


To Discover What Follows

by Sensha_do



Category: Love Live! School Idol Project
Genre: Doctor AU, F/F, Light Angst, Light Sexual Content, Yuri
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-05-21 14:23:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 50,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14917014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sensha_do/pseuds/Sensha_do
Summary: A doctor at the start of her career meets an idol at the end of her own.





	1. Sunday

**Author's Note:**

> After I finished "In the Morning", I struggled writing anything NicoMaki related. I've left nearly a dozen fics unfinished, and for a time, I thought I'd simply said everything I could ever say about this couple. A scary thought indeed. However, after months of hard work, I was able to write this.
> 
> The entire story is finished and, other than this first week, will be posted twice a week until it's over. There are a few "Sunshine!" characters who will show up, but as they aren't the major focus of the story, I didn't find it necessary to make this a crossover.
> 
> Enjoy~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After I finished "In the Morning", I struggled writing anything NicoMaki related. I've left nearly a dozen fics unfinished, and for a time, I thought I'd simply said everything I could ever say about this couple. A scary thought indeed. However, after months of hard work, I was able to write this.
> 
> The entire story is finished and, other than this first week, will be posted twice a week until it's over. There are a few "Sunshine!" characters who will show up, but as they aren't the major focus of the story, I didn't find it necessary to make this a crossover.
> 
> Enjoy~

_**"** A meaningful relationship thrives on reasserting yourself against the other; that is what it is to relate rather than to be alone."_

Dear Thief: A novel \- Samantha Harvey

* * *

That morning was far from the first that Dr. Maki Nishikino was glad her hospital had such a peaceful and quiet garden. Surrounded by four all-glass walls from the interior sections of Tokyo General Hospital, the garden in the center of the building was created nearly a decade before as a donation by her very own family. Vibrant green grasses and forest-colored ferns and multi-hued petals dotted with the innumerable rainbow of colors from native and tropical flowers made up the majority of the grounds. They radiated eye-catching vibrancy in bright red anemone and sunset daylilies and baby blue hydrangea among other flowers living the chromatic scale. The stone path around the garden had a number of tasteful wooden benches placed neatly where patients, families, and doctors sat alike and equal in the quiet serenity of a pocket of nature in the heart of a modern metropolis. Not a single visitor spoke above a low, respectful tone as if to preserve the fragile atmosphere of the beautiful space. Deep in a platform of raised stones in the center of the garden lay a Koi pond full of the eponymous fish in mottled gold and white and orange scales. The fish swam in their graceful animal mindlessness awaiting a scrap or a crumb from the large creatures who delivered them.

Dr. Nishikino was the one delivering the food that morning. She stood alone, still in her starch-white lab coat, and threw pieces of floppy cafeteria wheat bread into the pond between sips of black coffee just burnt enough to kill her taste buds and her appetite for the remaining hours of her shift. Though the air was still chilly on that overcast May morning, there was the suggestion, the pronouncement, of a warm spring storm in the clammy moisture beading on Maki's forehead, on the back of her neck and behind her knees. It rained the night before. Weighty droplets of water ran down some of the higher, glassy leaves of the trees and plopped in heavy plinking tones onto the stones beneath. Caught in this unpleasant mixture of chilly balminess, of mild moisture, the doctor didn't get the relief she hoped for when she stepped outside for the first and only break she'd taken on this impossibly long shift. She hoped to forget, for a moment, the colorful tendrils of cancer on imaging results, the ruined sculptures of broken bones, the death-echo of emphysemic cough and all other matters of illness and disease for a time. But the oppressive, clammy moisture only made these realities press on her mind like the sweat on her skin. Her father had told her, from his own decades of experience, that to do her job correctly she had to disconnect herself from the patients. That she had to compartmentalize, to lock away her feelings and sever her heartstrings all in order to avoid feeling every Pyrrhic victory or eventual failure the occupation was full of. But even after her residency and the first near year of her career, her execution of this advice was not perfect. The locked vault in the back of her heart might suddenly swing open in the middle of successful and failed cases alike.

She was halfway through the saggy slice of bread when a small hand reached out to pull at her white coat. The hand tugged twice without much strength, as if the owner was just a bundle of nervous energy. That or, as Maki found out after turning around, a child. Wide-eyed and expectant in that innocently selfish way children are, the kid stared up at Maki. He was somewhere in around six or eight and had shoulder-length black hair that fell over curiously red eyes, staring at her full of questions. The boy smiled when Maki finally looked at him, but the young doctor could hardly contain her own awkwardness in dealing with children. She quickly swept her eyes around the garden for a parent, but found none. There wasn't anyone out there besides her and the boy.

"Miss doctor?" the child asked.

"Uh, yes?"

"Can you help my big sister?" the child looked even more expectant than before. "She hasn't seen her doctor yet, and she's getting cranky."

Maki opened her mouth to answer, but closed it tight without a word; she wasn't actually sure what to say to that. This child's older sister likely had an assigned doctor with her on their list of rounds, but the hospital _was_ currently somewhat understaffed. There were simply cases - the less serious ones, the less dangerous ones - that the doctors made necessary decisions to put off despite the best of intentions. Maki glanced at her watch. She only had fifteen minutes left of her break and she wasn't actually dong anything important. Sighing a bit, she ripped the remainder of the bread into pieces before tossing them en masse into the awaiting circle of gaping fish mouths. The splashes sounded much like the rain the night before.

The young boy lead Maki into the building and then into the elevators, never pausing while he issued glowing praise about his big sister. Whoever this girl happened to be was at once a domestic homebody able to cook a meal for five while sweeping and doing laundry all at once. On top of this - supposedly - the girl was also a world famous idol. In the child's own words, the "Number one idol in the universe". Maki held her unspoken reservations and simply followed the child, who didn't appear to care that she hadn't spoken to him in minutes. Maki grew red and looked away bashfully when a couple of her colleagues' heads turned to view the normally no-nonsense doctor tailing a kid around busy hospital hallways.

Their destination was the fourth floor. Coincidentally, this was the floor where the majority of Maki's rounds were. She paused at the nurses' station to ask whether any new patients had been added to her list, but the boy tugged at her coat once more and she used the last bit of her patience to take a deep breath and follow him. It took quite a bit of willpower for Maki to hold in a frustrated groan as she was once again pulled along. Nozomi, the head nurse on call, shook her head with barely hidden amusement fighting its way to her face. The near end of Maki's nerves coincided with the end of the trip. When they reached a room at the end of the farthest hallway of the left-most wing, the boy abandoned Maki to run giggling into the room. A quick glance at the name tag by the door revealed the patient's last name to be "Yazawa".

Maki kept her back straight as she readied herself to enter the room. Being a one-person room positioned discreetly in the hospital, the patient grew even more mysterious. The young boy was already crawling up onto the bed when Maki walked in uncertainly, but she hid any anxiety behind a professional mask. She couldn't explain why she was so nervous, only that a certain pressure had built up in the strangeness of this single patient. Maki's eyes met the woman's the moment she walked over the threshold. The patient was scowling on the hospital bed as if even being in the room was a problem. She was a petite woman, small and thin, with the same shade of midnight hair and curious red eyes as her brother. Her face was youthfully pretty - fresh and round and expressive down to the smallest quirks of her lips - but the attractiveness was marred by an angry grimace and narrowed gaze. She gave the impression of a surly teenager, and was crossing her arms as such.

"Took you long enough." came the patient's high pitched voice, which was colored with cynical impatience. Maki was taken aback for a moment. How rude could someone be within seconds? But professionalism was ingrained in the doctor. Patients were often a bit discourteous because of pain. _That_ was a common enough occurrence. It was hard to blame them, but bad attitudes never put anyone in Maki's good graces.

Maki didn't answer when she reached the patient in the bed before her. Instead she grabbed the medical chart chained to the foot-board of the bed and flipped through it. According to the chart, the patient - scowling deeper now, even as she absentmindedly patted her brother on the head - suffered from acute exhaustion, potentially a minor concussion, a menu of pulled muscles and an overwhelming, whole body fatigue. Glancing up from the chart for a visual assessment, Maki wondered how the girl could sound so strong and confident in her rudeness when her body _clearly_ suffered from everything Maki had just read: she had pallid skin, eyes ringed by dark half-moons, and a general aura of weakness and of weariness flowing off her body. From the same chart she learned that she was the doctor assigned to Nico Yazawa. More surprisingly, it turned out the woman was older than Maki had expected: 27, and not, as she thought, closer to 17. Strangest of all, Maki found a note stapled behind the rest of the pages signed by an _idol production agency_ , with explicit instructions to keep their "star idol under professional care for seven days, to make certain that all was well". Following that was a clear order to prevent any and all media intervention. The note ended with a request not to mention said note to Nico at all. All of this only deepened the mystery of this _Nico Yazawa_. Maki could hardly prevent a look of annoyed confusion from showing on her face.

"Your brother cares for you a lot, Ms. Yazawa." Maki was all professionalism now, falling quickly from the uncertainty she walked in with to the habits of the job she was born to do. Once she knew the patient's issues Maki tended to feel much more confident regardless of how good or bad the prognosis was. Knowledge, after all, was power. Even if she didn't understand what was going on with this idol business, she could still do her job.

"Yes he does. Cotaro is a good boy, isn't he?" Nico looked down at her brother affectionately with all traces of her previous attitude gone. At least until it returned in the next sentence. The mood whiplash was like the strike of a cobra, who'd reared back before striking in an instant. "Aren't you a little _young_ to be a doctor?"

Maki recoiled. She thought her serious and adult demeanor - not to mention the carefully selected designer clothing she wore beneath her lab coat - gave her the impression of maturity. Of authority. In an uncharacteristic outburst she snapped back, "Aren't you a little _small_ to be an adult?". The words slipped through her teeth like air, weightless and forceful all at once.

Silence fell over the room for a moment, until a crooked smile cut through Nico's scowl. "Not bad. I guess you have a spine." She flashed an even wider smile, a practiced one, and then sat up straighter in bed. She held a small hand out to Maki. "Nico Yazawa, professional idol and current star of Sunrise Idol Agency."

So her brother wasn't lying; the girl really was an idol. Now that Maki knew this for a fact. flashes of news reports and magazine covers she'd mostly ignored filled her head. Nico-nii, who she know knew was actually Nico Yazawa, had been an idol for close to 10 years. From the time she was 17 Nico's somewhat unlikely success story took her from a struggling household to national stardom, where she remained for far longer than nearly any other idol in an industry where even five years made someone a veteran. Nico-nii was known for her wide, infectious smile and unlimited energy, the latter of which seemed sapped away in the swaddling of the hospital bedding and the former Maki seemed immune to.

"I'm Dr. Maki Nishikino. How are you feeling this morning?"

"Ready to get out of here." She was completely serious as she said this. Maki nearly scoffed.

"Ms. Yazawa - "

"Nico's fine, or Nico-nii. Your call."

" _Ms. Yazawa_ , you only _just_ arrived an hour ago, according to your chart. Judging by all of this," Maki shook the chart in her hands. "You're not getting out of here for at least a week. There are compound issues here and you don't want to exacerbate any of them."

"A _week?!_ You can't _actually_ be serious. Look, I have a busy schedule - _"_

"I still have to check over your injuries, make sure you're getting proper nutrition and rest, help develop a physical therapy plan..." Maki listed off her fingers.

"Doc, I have a tour to practice for - "

"And I'm not clearing you until your healthy enough to get back out there."

Nico glared at the doctor and the doctor glared back; little Cotaro seemed not to notice the sparking animosity in the air when he practiced his sister's trademark hand-sign. "Nico Nico-nii!" he called out. But Nico was not _nico_ -ing at all. There wasn't even the hint of a smile on her face.

She took her leave before that burning stare-down could start a fire. The way Nico looked at her was as though she'd been given a death sentence, her bed a grave, the name on her door the stone. There were two or three more hours of her shift from when Maki left Nico, but through the haze of the troubled cloud that she'd fallen under since she zoned out in the garden, the only other patient that cleared that fog was a young girl by the name of Ruby Kurosawa. To Maki, the girl seemed almost doll-like; big, innocent eyes, a set of cherr-red twintails decked out with cute white clips, and a petite body made smaller through sickness - the girl was full of cotton candy sweetness and a near-equal amount of sticky, apprehensive nervousness. When Maki made her rounds and arrived at the girl's room, Ruby was halfway through crying at whatever played on the small tv hanging in the corner. Her sister, angry and intense, regal and commanding, sat beside her with her nose in some schoolwork.

"Hello, Miss Kurosawa." Maki greeted at the girl's bedside. "I understand that you were admitted for -"

" - Cardiomyopathy." The sister, Dia, finished. She pulled a list out of her purse with handwriting more neat and orderly than Maki thought humanly possible. "These are her current medications, allergies, symptoms, and whatever related information I saw fit to inform you of." Dia handed Maki the list; the doctor bit back her own sound of surprise. Her patients were hardly ever this prepared, no matter how much she would have liked that.

"Thank you, Ms. Kurosawa." she nodded, and then turned to the girl on the bed. "Ruby, would you mind sitting up for me?"

Maki was not a people person, but she attempted to make small talk as she placed the freezing stethoscope on various spots of Ruby's chest and back. Each touch of the cold metal elicited a slight cringe in the patient and an even more murderous stare in the severe eyes of her sister. Like a drunk drummer, Ruby's heartbeat sounded irregular and, worse still, weak to Maki's ears. There was a distinct effort Ruby was making to stay still as well, her chest shuddered with every breath.

"How do you feel?"

"Tired," Ruby answered timidly. "And weak. A little s-short of breath."

Another press of the stethoscope was followed by another cringe. "Anything interesting on tv?" Maki tried distracting the girl.

"I j-just heard a rumor that my favorite idol might," she sniffled loudly, "might get dropped from her contract. Apparently she got hurt in a practice session. I-it would be so sad if that happened!"

"Oh? And who might that be?" Maki asked, ignorant of anything idol-related. She was thankful for the distraction the tv granted Ruby. Her own job was easier if she could get a patient to relax, even if it was only in a small way.

"Nico-nii!"

"Ah." Maki paused. Her brow furrowed and she stood up without saying anything for a few moments. "Well, I'll schedule some tests and we'll see where we can go from there."

And so, with a sense of responsibility sprouting up from somewhere Maki couldn't control, the last patient she headed to on that day was none other than Nico Yazawa. The walk to the girl's room was strangely free of other people, and the halls clear of the unceasing clamor of a hospital. Maki looked in on Nico, who had just hung up her phone, before entering the room. Nico's hands were clenched into knuckle-white fists, her normal twin tails replaced with straight hair, and her eyes - her eyes struck Maki like a fire, like a blazing inferno. There was a distinct lack of sadness or self-pity in their depth. Only anger gave the already ruby-red eyes an even more intense gleam, a knife-like luster. The missing sorrow somehow became Maki's own. Her heart ached for Nico, though she could hardly say she knew or respected the girl's work. It just seemed so upsetting to the doctor that the patient wasn't even allowing herself to cry. Nico's eyes were desert dry, Maki's only slightly less so. The doctor walked in clearing her throat. She feigned ignorance of the rumor she'd just heard.

"Thought I'd check in on our VIP," Maki said with sarcasm. "It's been a few hours - have you been hydrating? Resting?" she hoped her attempt to be lighthearted might distract the woman. She didn't want to deal with the mood she was sure Nico was in, though a part of her appreciated seeing beneath the idol persona and haughty confidence, between the candy-coated exterior and the bitter layer beneath.

Nico didn't answer. In the corner were two or three more sets of personal belongings than she expected Nico to have: bags and coats and the like. When she'd left early on there were just a few things Cotaro had brought up with him when Nico was first admitted, though at the moment he wasn't anywhere to be found. Awkward moments of uncomfortable silence took over the cold room before Maki picked up Nico's chart again. Acute exhaustion, fatigue, pulled and strained muscles, a possible concussion - what Nico was suffering from was really the final toll of years of non-stop dancing and performing. She suffered from the remains of the practiced twists, jumps, and movements an idol on near-constant tour went through. It was only natural. Nico should have known all of that work would catch up one day. But it still felt unfair, and Maki understood, at least a little, why Nico was angry more than anything else.

"We'll develop a recovery plan tomorrow, Ms. Yazawa."

"Whatever gets me back out there." Nico finally answered. She didn't look at Maki. Her eyes were still trained on her phone as if she could burn through it, through the wireless phone signal, and right into the agency members who must have given her the news that very afternoon.

"Whatever gets you the _healthiest_." Maki corrected. "As your doctor, that's my job whether you like it or not."

Nico looked up finally, smirking. "I won't back down. I'll be the number one idol _and_ the number one patient"

"Tomorrow, then."

"Tomorrow."

Maki left work feeling a little self-satisfied. Even if it was a smirk, she was glad to have gotten that rude idol to smile for a moment.


	2. Monday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's chapter 2! I had some fun writing this chapter, so I hope you all have fun reading it.
> 
> Enjoy~

There was never enough time to sleep, though Maki was now too many years into life to be surprised at that. She had suffered through the early mornings of her middle and high school days, when she spent her time studying into the night. College was a minefield of even more work. Her classes were both earlier in the morning and later into the night than the grades before, and just as tiring. Fieldwork, observations, and residency killed off whatever sleep time she might have had in college, and since becoming a doctor Maki waved goodbye to the goddess of sleep for good. Whatever rest she got was more of a long nap now, a period of a few hours on a spare stretcher or the escape to her barely-lived in apartment where, even in the privacy of her own walls, she might be on call. The morning after Nico arrived Maki had an early shift, but she was up far before the dawn and stared up at her ceiling for a few useless minutes. With little to do she sat at the bench of the small piano in her apartment. Her fingers were poised over the keys like soldiers awaiting orders but something was stopping her. She couldn't play. Every time she began, Nico's image popped into her head. The fantasy of how she might feel if her own career or musical ability were taken from her filled her stomach with swirling unease. The piano was Maki's only respite from stress. Even though it was also a job, Maki wondered if being an idol wasn't Nico's own form of escape.

With nothing to do at home, Maki found herself back in the hospital garden again. The sky was still overcast and the unavoidable touch of humidity in the otherwise cold air rubbed uncomfortably over her skin like cold sweat that forms after going for a run in the winter. On a bench far to the left of the pond Maki sat, her eyes closed and her arms stretched out before her holding onto a cup of coffee with both hands. Her legs were crossed, though in what should have been a relaxing moment the girl's brow was furrowed in stress, her mouth a thin line of worry. She didn't regret being a doctor. She never would. But it was an undeniably stressful career. She wasn't even on shift yet but the upcoming patients she had to visit, the illnesses and abrasions she would hope to heal weighed heavily on her mind. And Nico was a whole different story. There was no telling what kind of headache an idol could give her.

Maki noticed how the night's rain dripped in large drops off of verdant, waxy leaves, or beaded in small drips on the delicate petals of vibrant flowers. For a moment a sense of deja vu overcame her like a shroud; the same scene, the same place, the same empty listlessness nagging at her from some darker corner of her mind. And seeing those gleaming red eyes and black hair didn't help her mental state.

"Ms. Yazawa? What are you doing out of bed? You should be resting."

The woman rolled her eyes. She had a soft pink cardigan draped around her shoulders covering most of the thin blue hospital gown she still wore. Maki hadn't heard her approach; either Nico was quiet, or Maki lost some of the observatory edge she prided herself on in her line of work. There were other people milling about the garden like burrowing animals. cutting trails into the small stone paths they paced over.

"I don't really think that sitting on a park bench is labor intensive."

"With your current condition, getting down here might as well be."

"My body still works." Nico said. There was the shadow of something else in her voice, some echo of an earlier conversation lurking in those words. Maki ignored it. She knew what it was that Nico really meant.

"Guess I'll start with you today, then. To get it over with."

"I'm wounded, Maki." Nico dramatically placed a hand over her heart.

" _Dr. Nishikino._ And I'm just making things easier on myself - it has nothing to do with you. _"_

"Got it, doc. I'll see you upstairs." Nico tossed the rest of her morning toast into the water. The Koi swam up to the surface to devour it all, each piece sucked into gaping mouths like a vacuum and disappearing immediately. She walked away, and Maki listened to her footsteps disappear.

Her shift started minutes later. As usual, the hospital felt almost alive all around her - the never-ending cycle of shifts, the current of patients and doctors passing through the place like tides, giving and taking land over and over again. There never was enough doctors for the amount of patients coming into the hospital's care. Maki managed to make it through the place with practiced efficiency, with eyes all around watching for wheelchairs and wet floors, with ears open for the funeral cry of a heart monitor flat lining or the delighted, ecstatic sigh of a new father being told their wife and child would be fine. A current - everything in the hospital was a current. Even Nico, who hadn't left her mind from the night before, was only a part of the momentary tide.

Maki arrived at the fourth floor and headed straight for the nurses' station. Nozomi, the head nurse on call, was a young violet-haired woman with a look always somewhere between enigmatic and affectionate. Maki never knew exactly what the woman was thinking, only that Nozomi had the uncanny ability to know just what _everyone else_ seemed to be thinking. A day couldn't go by without Nozomi glancing in the eyes of some poor resident before bringing up a problem in their lives - and then helping them solve it before they could blink.

"Morning, Maki." she greeted. Maki placed her arms on the counter and leaned over, reading over files Nozomi left for her. "You've got a new patient in 405, Ruby Kurosawa's test results are in, and," Nozomi learned forward and lowered her voice. Her large chest pressed against the counter-top. "Your _very_ _important_ _patient_ seemed to try to escape last night."

"She _what?"_

"A nurse found her disguising herself with some sunglasses and a surgical mask." At Maki's irritated pout, she laughed. "She didn't get too far. Don't make that face, Maki. She's an idol - theatrics are kind of her thing."

Maki turned without a word and headed straight for Nico's room. Amid the clamor of the hospital - of the squeak of shoes and layered tenor of voices - Maki marched on in anger. She barely registered the nurse's jovial laughter behind her. A doctor was supposed to be objective and limit their emotional response, but Maki couldn't think of that at that moment. She clenched her fists and walked even faster.

Unlike the day before, when she had timidly looked in on Nico before walking into the room, Maki stormed in with the force of a hurricane. On the table beside the hospital bed was a messy pile of important-looking documents whose edges were crumbled in anger. Though she only looked at them for a moment she thought she saw the world "agency" in the headers. Nico sat under the covers absorbed in something on her laptop. She didn't look up but held up a finger when Maki crossed the threshold.

"One minute. Just finishing up a 'thank you' post to some concerned fans."

"I _do_ have other patients, you know." the doctor crossed her arms. She tried to pressure Nico with her presence, but the idol didn't even blink.

"Then why'd you pick the great Nico-nii as your first? Couldn't wait to see me?"

"Don't be stupid, Yazawa. What's this I hear about you trying to escape last night?"

Nico clicked her laptop closed and placed it conspicuously over the papers on the bedside desk. The room's large window had its curtains drawn tight, but gray light still filtered into the room and landed on the piles of papers now hidden from Maki's prying eyes. "I did no such thing. I just wanted some air."

"With sunglasses and a mask on?"

"I'm a _celebrity_. I've gotta stay hidden when I can."

Maki shook her head; she wasn't going to get anywhere like this. Instead, she rolled up the sleeves of her white coat. "Never mind. Just let me try to do some preliminary testing on the sites where you're most injured. I can work with our PT team to figure something out afterwards." she slipped on a pair of latex gloves from a box near the door, pulling them tight with a snap at her wrists. While Maki walked over from the door, Nico kicked the blanket off of herself unceremoniously and sat with her legs crossed on the bed. All she had on besides her underwear was her hospital gown, which draped over her petite frame like a wilted flower, unflattering in its lifeless hanging. The idol's hair fell down her back in a straight dull curtain. With the rings under her eyes and the pale look of her skin, she looked like anything in the world other than a world-famous idol. And yet Maki still had to admit to herself that there was something preternaturally cute about her patient, a radiant kind of light she could not block out but tried to as best as she could. Maki found her heart racing just a little too fast regardless.

"According to your chart, you have a pulled muscle in your left thigh and upper arm, painful soreness in your right calf, and debilitating tightness in your upper back. Is this right? Is there anything else?"

"...My knees." She said reluctantly. Her lips spat the words out like they formed in burning ashes on her tongue.

Maki nodded and reached lightly for Nico's upper left arm. Though slender like the rest of her body, Nico's arm felt strong under Maki's fingers; they didn't sink in to the flesh as she expected. She felt the taught muscle unyielding and strong under her hands. Maki took a deep breath and tried very hard stay removed and objective; it helped to recount various disease in an incessant mantra. She pressed lightly this way and that way along the upper arm to feel for weakness or damage. Then, closer to the woman's shoulder, where the muscle felt strange, Nico flinched under Maki's touch. She removed her hand and wrote this in her notes. Nico rubbed at the sore spot sourly.

"Turn around." Maki ordered. "Your upper back, beneath your shoulders. That's where I'm checking next."

Nico nodded, but said nothing as she turned away from Maki to face the featureless wall painted in the same beige as the rest of the hospital. The doctor felt a bit awkward as she spread open the top of the slit of Nico's hospital gown to place her hands in those soft valleys between the idol's beautiful neck and shoulders. She kneaded the areas lightly and felt for some kind of taught pull beneath her fingers but found in its place tightness, tension, twisted cords of muscle leading from the valleys between her shoulder across the plains of her upper back, under her slender neck, and down the hills of her shoulder blades. A shawl of stress-twisted flesh. Maki wasn't a physical therapist, but even she recognized the severity of the issue. Beneath her fingers she felt, more than heard, Nico's quickened breath. Maki removed her hands and wrote her findings down as well. Her mantra stopped working; all of this touching formed a sinking heat in her stomach. Never before had she felt this way with a patient and it was both alarming and frightening, though what was _more_ alarming and _more_ frightening was the part of her enjoying it all. Time was moving in languid waves and there was some trick of the light, some tint in the balmy spring sun and air, that was intensifying her senses. There didn't seem to be a "before" or "after". Everything was simply an extended present without a beginning or end.

"You can turn around now." she said, not looking up as she wrote her notes. She heard the shuffle of the blanket as Nico turned to face her once more. When she looked up, she tried her best to ignore the flush of the idol's cheeks and the cute pout on her face.

"Just my legs now, right? Then you can develop a plan to get me out of here fast."

"Again, " Maki moved to the foot of the bed; Nico turned accordingly. "What I'm here to do is make my patients better, not matter how long it takes."

"How long does it take you to do your hair in the morning?" Nico asked out of nowhere. There was a strange emotion in her eyes that Maki couldn't recognize. Nico reached out a hand without warning and rubbed a lock of Maki's wine-red hair between her fingers. Maki froze in place. She didn't even breathe until Nico let the hair fall back in place with a satisfied hum.

"W-what was that?! And what are you asking something like that for?" she shook her head, pouting more to undercut the blood creeping up her cheeks. She patter her hair back in place, but the ghost of Nico's hand felt glued there. Nico didn't answer; she just stared at Maki with that same inexplicable emotion. Maki growled under her breath and with quick movements she wrapped her hand around the underside of the woman's smooth, shaven calf. She placed the other on the knee, gripping and feeling for the same kind of damage she'd found elsewhere. In her anger she pressed harder than she intended to. Nico took a sharp intake of breath and shot her a look, and it served as a reminder to try to distance herself again. There was a definite knot in her calf, tight like a rubber band ball, but Maki couldn't find the problem in her knee. Not a specific one. She didn't say it out loud, but she figured the problem might simply be overuse. Collective damage and weariness that built up from years and years of precise dancing. She dropped the woman's leg gently back on the bed and recorded this all in her notes.

"Just lie down now, Yazawa. The last thing I need to check is your thigh."

With the slightest pause and an inquiring quirk to her eyebrow Nico followed Maki's order and laid straight down on the bed. The room grew quieter, or became a different species of silent, as Maki leaned forward and pushed the woman's gown up for more access. She inched the hem up in invisible notches going from "acceptable" to "dangerous" in the amount of skin showing, not to mention the nearness of the prize that lay at the end of that scale. She stopped at a point three-quarters up Nico's left thigh and then began to feel it with her gloved fingertips, poking lightly and prodding gently, hoping to find the damage fast so that she could salvage this awkward scene. Nico's thighs, though lean and strong, had more give beneath her hands. Maki's fingers sank deeper into the soft skin and left a light red fingerprint in their wake wherever she pressed down. Maki paused for a moment. An unavoidable urge filled her head; she wanted badly to rip her gloves off to feel just how soft and supple Nico's skin had to be. It took everything she had to keep those gloves on and continue her inspection. Neither of them had spoken in minutes, though Maki felt Nico's breath quicken when her fingers rubbed or prodded this way or that. A few fruitless moments passed. She'd have to try something else to feel the damage in her thigh.

"I'm going to try a different technique." Maki took her hands away slowly. She could see Nico bite her lip before responding.

"Go ahead."

After taking the supple leg gently in her hands, Maki lifted it up and pushed it forward, bending at the knee raised a bit above the woman's supine position. She hoped to feel tightness or weakness in the muscle, and already there were signs she hadn't felt minutes before. She pushed the leg with her bodyweight and closed the distance between herself and Nico so that her lower body was flush against the back of Nico's raised thigh and the hint of the curve of her rear. She was still feeling for pain, or a reaction on Nico's flushed, searching, face. Or so the lie worked in her head to convince herself why she was pressing her body so close to Nico's, for why she was gazing so deeply into Nico's ruby eyes while caressing her thigh. For why she was well aware of the swell of Nico's breasts beneath the thin material of the hospital gown, which was riding up past that previous notch until it was far past "dangerous" and exposing Nico's pink panties. For why blushes painted both women's faces. For why Nico was lifting her head up to Maki's lips, and Maki was lowering her face at the same time -

"I believe Dr. Nishikino is in this room. Let's see if she can offer you residents any advice on..."

Though she had never been a part of any kind of sudden tragedy, Maki understood that that silence that followed a terrifying event must be like the one she felt just then. She barely won the inner conflict not to throw herself out of the window in Nico's room. She straighted her body with deliberate slowness and turned to face the door, standing in front of the bed protectively and hiding Nico entirely from the questioning eyes of a doctor and a gaggle of six residents. Maki only appreciated after the fact that the nameplate beside the door read only "Yazawa", leaving the patient's true identity unknown to the young residents - each of whom stood with some expression between amusement, shock, and barely-contained laughter.

Maki coughed into her fist. "Good morning, Dr. Minami. I was just...testing the bending angle of my patient's knee and - and the tightness of her muscles." It took all of her willpower to turn to the residents and ask. "If anyone has any...advice they'd like I can, uh, offer my viewpoint."

"Dr. Nishikino," Dr Minami nodded, terse, her eyebrows arched in unspoken questions. A pause, and then, "Well, let's be on our way." she nodded to the giggling group of residents before returning down the hallway towards any room but that one. Maki pinched the bridge of her nose and wished for death. Several deep breaths later, Nico broke the silence.

"How'd my thigh feel?" the idol groaned. "I mean, did you feel anything injured there?"

"That was my mentor! A friend of my father's. The mother of my best friend." Maki answered instead, her voice sounding like an angry ghost rising from the grave. She held her face in her hands. "This is all your fault, _Yazawa_."

" _My_ fault?" the woman shot up, eyes blazing. " _You're_ the one who was feeling me up!"

"I was just doing my job! Don't say it like that!" she swallowed. "And-and you didn't have to blush the way you did!"

"Look in a mirror! You're like a tomato yourself!"

"I have other patients to check up on!" she stomped towards the door. "You'll have your results and a plan by tomorrow."

The rest of Maki's shift passed by like a sideshow. Each patient,each problem moving along with the barest transition; though she tried her best to stay in the moment with all of them, Maki shamed herself for her drifting mind and lack of attention. A doctor shouldn't be distracted. It came at the potential cost to her other patients' health. And it didn't help that work was the last place she should be thinking about Nico the way she was.

Immediately after storming out of Nico's room Maki headed to the room of Mr. Takumi. Takumi was a sixty year old man suffering from a bad case of the Shingles. His arms, his torso, the tops of his legs and his back all blared red and were covered in itchy bumps, a map of sores and lesions like the surface of Mars. An IV bag dripped a painkiller directly into his bloodstream which spread like fog through his veins. Through half-lidded eyes the man smiled a dopey grin. "Good mornin', doctor."

"Good morning, Mr. Takumi. Feeling any better?"

The man shook his head but offered a small chuckle. "Thankfully, I'm not feeling much at all right now."

He allowed Maki to check his wounds, which appeared to have stopped spreading. The sores and rashes were sickly slick and shiny with the ointment she had been helping to cover his wounds with. Maki made a note in his chart, wished the man a good day, and left for other patients. Two rooms down she met with a young woman with shoulder-length tangerine hair and a sunshine smile, all energy and sparkle even as she was confined to a bed. The girl all but jumped off the bed at the sight of the doctor, and might have if she physically could have. Though she'd only been in the hospital for a few days, her side of the room was a mess of clothing and jackets and personal goods.

"Hi, doctor!" the girl greeted before Maki even set both feet into the room. With her one good arm she waved to Maki excitedly.

"You're awfully energetic for someone with a broken arm and a broken leg." Maki deadpanned. It didn't take long after Rin Hoshizora was brought in for the doctor to discern that there really wasn't much that could bring the young girl down. Her smile was perpetual.

"That's right!" Rin's already wide eyes grew wider in a moment of realization before she leaned over to reach her phone on the table beside her bed. Her right arm was encased in a hard cast signed lovingly by family and friends. Her right leg was similarly immobile and laid elevated on a soft pillow. In the short time that Rin had spent in the hospital she'd already gained a reputation to the staff as excessively kind and immeasurably energetic, if not a little childlike with her bouncing attention span.

"I gotta show you something, doc! That kitty I jumped in front of the car to save? It didn't have an owner. My mom is taking it to the vet to get tested, and then I can have it as a pet! She's mine now - isn't it great?!" The words streamed unceasingly. Maki smiled through it all as well as she could. She checked up on Rin's casts, handling the broken limbs like unbroken glass, but it almost seemed like she could have slapped the arm and leg and Rin wouldn't have noticed. She was _that_ enthralled in the pictures of a small tabby cat. Rin cycled through the photos on her phone, and each time she all but shoved the device in Maki's face to share. It was too early to say much about the nature of Rin's healing, but in Maki's professional opinion things were going well. She'd send the girl home in another day or two, and see her again weeks later to remove the casts. Still, at the time, Rin's joy was infectious and Maki was glad for the distraction from, well, _whatever_ had happened between herself and Nico Yazawa.

That's what the rest of the day became for Maki - a distraction - and Maki thanked the stars that it worked. The end of her shift arrived in the dark of the night, though that didn't matter much to a hospital in the normal sense. Days weren't counted by the movement of the Sun but were measured by events: the span of time between a regular heartbeat and the shriek of a flat-line, or the amount of visits a family member made in those few-hours visiting was allowed. Time was measured by the ability of the ER attendants to respond to a patient bleeding out on their floor in shiny red ribbons or the gap between a birth and the "okay" given for a newborn to finally go home.

Home for Maki was an empty apartment, sparse in decoration and full with wanting. On the tenth floor of a high rise Maki's sizable apartment looked over the city with a long wall of glass. It was furnished with simple but tasteful furniture made mostly with leather and polished, high quality wood. It was all very stylish, but not many would know that; she rarely had visitors up to her apartment. The kitchen was full of shiny chrome top-of-the-line appliances, but she cooked so infrequently that it might as well be said that she never used them at all. Even the doctor's bedroom had the distinct sensation of a lack of personality, a lack of ownership. The space that should have been her own was clean, neat, and clinical, as if Maki purposefully swept away any hint of 'her' in the bed, or in the bathroom, or in the kitchen. An apartment she could post as a real-estate listing as-is, even though she'd rented it two years before, The only item in the place with any spark of life was the piano which sat in front of one of the glass wall panes, polished black but aged and resonant. It had been with her since childhood. Regular maintenance and retouching aside, it had an air of familiarity and love surrounding it. The piano's leather bench was an old friend to Maki.

After she arrived home Maki all but collapsed onto the love seat that so often served as her bed. The memory of the way she touched Nico, the way her fingers felt that soft, firm skin, the look in the woman's eyes, her blush, her breath...all of replayed in Maki's mind like a skipping record. It was with some bitterness that she admitted that that was the most intimate she'd be with a woman in an embarrassingly long span of time. Of course, Nico just _had_ to be insufferable otherwise. She just _had_ to be a famous pop idol who probably had a slew of suitors waiting in the wing, or rich friends to run off to and use to forget about the doctor. She just _had_ to be a patient, with all of the moral and ethical problems that entailed. The pleasure of the day and the irritation in her thoughts were a kind of torturous whirlpool flinging her feelings this way and that. For a moment, between bites of tasteless takeout and a glass of wine darker than her red hair, Maki allowed herself to fully accept the loneliness she worked hard to keep at bay. The beautiful young doctor choked back a sob.

She allowed herself a moment, and nothing more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!


	3. Tuesday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to thank everyone who has read and responded so far. It's this kind of support that makes writing worth it.
> 
> Enjoy~

"Miss Yazawa, this is Umi Sonoda, former Olympic athlete and current star of our physical therapy program. On top of the steps I've already recommended, Umi here will develop a plan to strengthen and heal your body." Maki motioned from Nico, dressed now in athletic shorts and a t-shirt, to the composed woman standing before them with a professional smile. It was mid-afternoon and Maki had lead Nico down to the hospital's PT wing on little notice. She tried to stay away from the woman for most of the day. Even walking near Nico's room that morning filled Maki's lungs with an air like the atmosphere before a thunderstorm, charged and still and ready to burst at any moment. They took the elevator and arrived at a set of small rooms, each with floors padded with blue gym mats. A variety of items laid in front the mirrored wall of each room: exercise balls, dumbbells, resistance cords, ropes, and hula hoops, to name a few. Maki didn't look at Nico while she lead her to one of the open rooms, where Umi waited patiently. She didn't trust her eyes not to roam irresponsibly.

While Umi had the lean, fit body of the world-class athlete she once was, it was her mannerisms and overall bearing that really spoke more about her than her looks ever could. Formality and practicality were parts of everything she did. Ceremony and tradition showed in her values. She was kind, but tough, and held herself straight-backed with her head held high at any and all moments. After being introduced, she smiled politely and bowed at the waist. Somehow, even while wearing gym clothing, Umi felt as though she'd fit in a traditional dojo.

"It's very nice to meet you, Miss Yazawa. Dr. Nishikino and I have already discussed your situation, but if you'll follow me into the room we can begin with a small examination."

"I'm sure you'll be impressed by my health." Nico boasted, puffing out her chest. "I've kept my body in tip-top shape as an idol."

"Says a girl in a hospital." slipped out of Maki's lips before she could stop it. She looked away in embarrassment.

"Hey!" Nico stomped her foot. "That was uncalled for, Nishikino!"

"It's not like it's not true! Don't be delusional, you're _literally_ talking to a doctor right now. In a _hospital_. How good can your health be?"

Nico seethed, before a smirk returned to her face. "I'm sure you can tell Umi here all about how healthy my body was, what with how you were groping me yesterday."

"G-groping?!"

"G-groping?!" Umi followed, unable to contain herself. She grew red and looked to Maki for reassurance. "Maki - "

"It was nothing!" Maki said. "She's delusional! You just heard her call herself healthy!"

"Hmph." Nico crossed her arms. Though she was smaller in stature, her attitude grew into a cloud over the other two women. Maki watched the former idol stomp into the PT room without another word. Maybe it was the the confidence, even in delusion, that Nico exuded, with her straight back and sure stride, but Maki struggled to look away.

"She's a handful, Umi. Good luck."

"I'll do my best." the woman turned away, but her face colored in a blush when she turned back to Maki. "By... _handful_ , you don't mean the shameless...groping she mentioned, do you?"

Even as Maki turned to walk away she heard Nico laugh. Maki stammered out an "Of course not!" that echoed down the hall.

Like the bulb of a strong spotlight continuing to burn after the power's been cut, Maki was still filled with frustration as she made her way to finish her rounds. To combat it, she tried to remember better times. Nico-less times. She remembered the joy that filled her when she walked down those very halls as a child, on the many occasions when her father took her to work. She followed his sure footsteps, imitating him to the near-patronizing praise of doctors and patients alike. Outside of the rooms with those suffering from infections and ailments her father wanted to shield her from, she would listen with her ear pressed to the cold hard door at muffled voices filled with emotions she didn't yet know. Her father's emotions and his patients' emotions alike.

She tried to avert her eyes from the garden when she passed the interior glass walls of the hospital. All she would get if she went out there was distracted. The atmosphere - the humid air, the breeze, the lid of clouds against which the vitality and color of the flowers and plants expressed themselves - beckoned Maki regardless. Through a trick of the light it was almost as if a different kind of brightness, sunnier and warmer, was coming from the outer facing windows of the hospital, but Maki knew she'd choose to be in her father's garden over the golden sunlight of the world outside of the hospital on any day. Sometimes, on those rare days when Maki had a relatively clear schedule, she would take patients down to the courtyard to see the fish and the plants and maybe, for a moment, to help them forget the pain that brought them to the hospital for the first place. She passed coworkers rushing past her or leaning against walls with their eyes boring holes into charts. Maki nodded sympathetically.

Most of her frustration was gone with the elevator ride from the first floor PT wing to the fourth floor, falling away in sheets while the elevator rose higher. The rest disappeared when Maki looked at the descending meteor of Ruby's health in her chart, a decline that seemed both unavoidable and unavoidably catastrophic. The poor girl's face was ghost pale and lifeless, her movements slow and strained as if it hurt to breathe. She still waved kindly to Maki when she stood in the doorway, discussing plans and contingencies with a nurse. The doctor wanted the keenest eye and most alert ear on the girl at all times. In the corner of Ruby's half of the room, Dia sat in the same hard plastic chair she hadn't left for more than minutes at a time. Beyond the curtain the dividing the room lay a sleeping elderly woman recovering from pneumonia. Maki walked in and stood close to Ruby's bed. She kept her voice low.

"Ms. Kurosawa, I would like to discuss a possibility with you, but I just want to warn you - it won't be a pleasant one."

She heard Dia stand up by the squeak of the plastic chair. It was all but a verbal 'stop' to the doctor, who closed her mouth with some difficulty, made worse by Ruby's wide eyed and expectant stare.

"I'd like to speak with you outside, Dr. Nishikino." Dia ordered. She didn't wait for a response, but moved with total assurance that Maki would follow. The doctor looked back at Ruby once before meeting Dia outside in the empty hall. It was hard to overcome the desire just to let the intense woman take control of the situation; Maki had a hard enough time dealing with giving bad news. Her eyes were narrowed. For all intents and purposes Dia had the severe look of a judge ready to dole out punishment. Only the white clip in her long black hair gave off any hint of girlishness, of levity or ease.

"As my sister's legal guardian, I want you to tell me first." she crossed her arms over her chest.

"If things keep trending downwards we might have to put her on the list." Maki swallowed thickly. Bad news always weighed heavier on her tongue. It was this part of the job - the personal care, the bedside manner, the announcement of bad news - that Maki was still so uncomfortable with. Dealing with a patient's emotions, with those of their family's, filled her with a sticky apprehension not unlike nausea. It was the greatest expression of her inexperience.

"By list, you mean...," her voice trailed off. It was the first sense of uncertainty and that Dia had shown, and her shoulders started to slump at the major implications of the unsaid and unwanted conclusion to the unfinished sentence.

"It may be that she'll need a heart transplant."

"I see." she leaned back on the wall. "I knew it was a possibility, but the reality of it is still..."

"It's still _just_ a possibility, Ms. Kurosawa." Maki reached out, placing an awkward hand on the girl's should for a moment before pulling it off just as stiffly. "I'll do what I can for your sister." she cleared her throat and tried to take on an authoritative tone of voice. "Who, I think, we should tell this to. She's the patient. She has every right to know."

Dia once more donned the mask she'd worn before - the severe eyes and set jaw, the imperial raise of her nose and the squaring of her shoulders. She was a knight, protecting the room of a princess. "No, not yet. Not until we know for certain."

"Don't you want her to be prepared?"

"There's no use preparing for something that you'll try your best to avoid, no, doctor?"

Wringing her hands for a moment, Maki begrudgingly left the decision to the teen girl's legal guardian. "Fine. I'll tell Ruby that all I was going to discuss were her more recent symptoms".

Dia nodded, and without another word walked into the room. The click of the knob after Maki followed her echoed like the ominous tick of a grandfather clock.

Telling Ruby had been just about as upsetting as Maki expected. She strolled the hallway afterwards slowly, her eyes roving over the various nameplates lining the walls. She stopped in on a few of the patients she hadn't yet seen that day, but it was almost strange, and not altogether unwelcome, that no one needed saving that day. That not one patient suffered more or pained enough to need Maki's attention outside of a quick check-in. Even those who arrived that day, the recently sick and newly afflicted, had the unexpected gift of not suddenly flat-lining with their souls lost in a blaring electronic cry, or their blood streaming to the delta of the shiny hospital floor. It was peaceful in a way that hospitals so rarely are. Maki continued to walk aimlessly towards the nurses' station where a flash of black and red drew her eyes like a magnet from across the room.

"Nico..." she growled under her breath. With heavy steps that echoed off of the floor Maki marched to the woman. That Nico was once again out of bed, after everything she'd been told, was infuriating. Maki hardly noticed that she was wearing a business skirt and that her hair was in something of a bun, but it _had_ to be Nico. It wouldn't be the first time she'd disguised herself to escape. When the doctor reached the woman she put a hard hand on her should and turned her around forcefully. She saw the face that she expected, but she also didn't.

"Miss...Yazawa?"

"Well, yes." the woman laughed, but by then it was clear - this was not Nico. Despite the similar face, the same eyes and skin, it wasn't Nico. The woman was clearly just that - a woman - aged, though well, with the laugh lines and stress creases and demeanor to distance herself from that overgrown child of a patient. "But I don't think I'm who you're looking for."

Maki pulled her hand off of the woman's shoulder in surrender, but to her immense surprise the woman quickly wrapped her in a hug. Maki stood, awkward and stiff, in the unexpected embrace. The not-Nico woman was soft and warm and motherly. "You must be Ma - I mean, Dr. Nishikino. Thank you for taking care of my daughter."

"How'd you guess that?" She answered, dumbstruck.

"The name on your ID." when Miss Yazawa pointed to the plastic card hanging over Maki's chest, the doctor pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Right, right."

"Plus, Nico told me that her doctor was the most beautiful in the building - but oops! Don't let her know I told you that!"

"The - the what?" Maki's face grew scandalously red.

But the woman had already left that conversation behind. "Why don't you come to the room with me? Have you seen Nico yet today?"

"I have."

"Still," the woman pouted, "Can I introduce you to the family?"

Not a minute later Maki strode into a room of clones. There were three people in the room besides Nico, who sat on the bed with her legs hanging off the side. Cotaro played with some toys on the floor, and two other girls Maki hadn't met appeared to be focusing on homework. Each member of the family, including Nico's mother, had the same red eyes and black hair, the same pettiness about them, the same skin and facial features and strength and resilience Maki saw in Nico, doled out into portions only differing with age. It was as if the father of the family had been gene-less, the children so looked like their mother and one another. Nico looked up from her magazine with curiosity, and when she noticed who walked through the door she smirked.

"Are you here to check up on me? I'll have you know that Umi told me I really wasn't _that_ damaged".

"What's with that attitude? That still means you're _somewhat_ damaged."

"But not as much as you expected!"

Maki moved forward in the midst of the argument, and Nico didn't back down, until she and the doctor were face to face. From behind, by the door, Maki could hear Ms. Yazawa laughing and was brought out of the haze of the argument with the burn of self-consciousness running up her face. She felt a tug on her lab coat and looked away from Nico to find Cotaro offering her a small action figure.

"That's Cotaro, who you might have met." Nico's mother introduced. "My youngest. And over there, in the chairs, are Cocoro and Cocoa." At their names the two girls looked up. The older looking one, Cocoro, waved kindly before going back to her homework. Beside her, Cocoa shouted out a small 'hi!' but then seemed to forget Maki at all as she looked over to her sister for homework help. There was an air in the room that Maki felt as a small sting in her chest. The Yazawa's exemplified the kind of family life she had wished for as a child. She loved her family, but in the Yazawa's she saw an intimacy that never really bloomed in her own. Her father treated her as an adult even when she was a child. He lead her, not by the hand, but by gently pushing her ahead around the hospital, a king introducing his royal daughter to the kingdom she'd once rule. This scene before Maki was different. It was the kind of thing she'd only seen in movies, or in the snippets of the lives of her patients and it came with the same insistence that she was apart, alone, an intruder. A doctor could bring bad news; people couldn't risk allowing that in too far.

Well," Maki said in a happy voice so forced even Cotaro looked up in question. "I think I should go. It was nice meeting you all."

"I'm sure we'll see you around." MIss Yazawa said kindly.

But Nico called out instead. "Wait, Nishikino!". She motioned to Cocoa to bring her a plastic bag from underneath the pile of backpacks and purses and coats in a corner of the room. When she did Nico thanked her, and then pulled from the bag a couple of shrink-wrapped CDs.

She turned, arching her eyebrows in question.

"Have you ever listened to my music? I mean, I _am_ the number one idol in the universe." Nico theatrically posed, a practiced expression. "So I expect that you have, but..."

"No, I haven't." Maki shrugged. "It's not my thing. I don't like idols, or pop music at that."

The room grew silent and heavy, like the rest of the night following a horror film. In her bed Nico was physically taken aback, her mouth open in an unsounded scream. The rest of the family stared at Maki with a range of confused faces, besides Ms. Yazawa, who bit her lip to hide the smile fighting to light up her face. Nico gripped the CDs in her hands harder unconsciously.

"You're joking, right?"

"I'm telling the truth." the redhead boasted, as if she were physically defending herself. "I play the piano. I grew up playing the piano. Even as a child I ignored music like that. Why would I need it? I have all the _actual art_ I want in classical music and jazz."

"Because that's just _boring!_ Where's the showmanship? How is that stuff bringing anyone smiles? How do those old dead guys have a good connection with their audience? Oh wait, _they don't_!"

"I've been to plenty of concerts by _real_ artists." Maki, who had moved towards the door with her goodbye, now stepped back into the room. The earlier awkwardness was forgotten; she had to tell Nico that she thought Nico was wrong, and that felt like it mattered more than anything else at that moment. "And watching their performance is a joy in and of itself. The skill involved is just incredible!"

"Psh! Call me when those stuffy losers hit every point of their dance routine and still manage to sing amazingly like I do."

"Please, Yazawa - "

"Do you want me to show you right now?" Nico was lifting herself off of the bed before Ms. Yazawa placed a hand on her daughter's shoulder. Cotaro and the two girls looked on in secret joy at the drama. Their big sister never backed down if it was idol related.

"I think that's enough, girls." she announced.

"Right." with a shake of her head Maki collected herself. She had trouble hiding the flush on her face behind a fist and a fake cough. "I'm going home soon, so I won't be back to check on you until tomorrow. Stay hydrated and get some rest if you ever want to actually _leave_ the hospital, Nico."

Nico's smirk arrived with a chuckle in tow. "Oh, so I'm Nico now? What happened to 'Miss Yazawa', _Maki_?"

" _Goodbye_ , Ms. Yazawa." she growled on her way out. She was hardly halfway down the hall when she heard Nico yell after her, "Which one?"

Maki hardly contained the urge to groan in exasperation. She only kept her cool as a fellow doctor passed her way in the hall outside of Nico's room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!


	4. Wednesday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I can hardly express just how grateful I am to all those who have read this story so far - and especially to those who have responded in some form or fashion. I truly appreciate it.
> 
> Enjoy~

_"Words made everything less safe, words had no limits, words made their own world."_

Freedom: A novel - Jonathan Franzen

* * *

Maki couldn't choose how to walk with Nico, and felt like a child because of it. Whether she should walk just beside the idol, or instead a few paces behind like a shamed child following the principal to her office, or if perhaps she should walk in front of her, to deflect questioning glares and confused searching looks...it was all too much to consider. She cycled through all the options without order or reason, and in any one hallway she might be following Nico's small frame and having trouble tearing her eyes from the alluring way the girl moved, while down another she might whisper a charged plea to simply stop. This was a bad idea - a complete mistake, really - and she knew it from the moment the words left her lips that morning. What had started as a plan to keep an eye on the woman (so that she wouldn't try to escape again), and to let her channel that incessant impatience ended up being far, far more involved than Maki ever expected it to be.

"You already agreed to this, Doctor. You can't take your word back now. Would you want to disappoint someone who brings others so many smiles like I do?"

"That's not the point. This whole idea is stupid and dangerous, for both of us. I can't even imagine the kind of trouble I'll get into - even before the legal issues." Maki shook her head, as if to physically dispel the thoughts.

Nico stopped short in front of a closed wooden instead of answering her. "According to that list that Nozomi - "

"You're on a first name basis already? I need to speak to that woman."

" _Gave me_ , this is the first patient we're going to see today."

"Let;s just get this over with, then." Maki breathed defeated, reaching for the door handle. She had a feeling that nothing she said would stop Nico from following her now. Wasting the energy she would need to keep the woman under control would be a mistake.

"Wait, wait!" Nico exclaimed as she wrapped her small, warm hand around Maki's wrist. The action froze the doctor mid knock. Nico's soft hand held more strength behind it than Maki had guessed it would, though she wasn't in pain. Finger marks like a red bracelet wrapped round her wrist for a moment after Nico let go. "How do I look?"

Maki pouted, but stood waiting. Nico twirled her body to the left and right a few times, before making one full turn. She stood with her hands on her hips expectantly. She wore a set of pink scrubs Maki pilfered from the supply closet, as well as a white lab coat. Her hair was tied up in a ponytail, and all in all she looked to be just any other resident. There was a stethoscope hanging around her collar. This was the first real taste of Nico's idol skill Maki had; the speed in which she dressed, the small touches in the fall of the coat or crease in the collar, the light makeup she applied in mere seconds to replicate the look of a tired, overworked resident. It all came together in minutes and worked flawlessly. Every action of hers was practical and efficient, likely from the training she gained changing between songs at concerts. If Maki didn't know just who she was, she'd never give Nico a second look in the busy hospital hallways. The look didn't even manage to take away any of the charm or allure the idol seemed born to radiate like a beam from a lighthouse. She was just as cute as aver. A light blush painted Maki's face.

"It's a passable disguise. I just hope no one's looking for a missing lab coat or stethoscope."

"Passable?" Nico scoffed, "Please, Maki. You're about to see an idol in action. I won't even need to sing to make everyone one of our patients happy."

"We'll see." Maki challenged before knocking. She called out an "excuse me" and opened the door when she heard the patient call out "Come in, come in".

"Follow my lead." Maki whispered while they walked in. As he had been for his entire stay, Mr. Takumi lay in cloudy pain on the hospital bed in the back of the room. A clear I.V. bag continued to drip a light pain reliever into his bloodstream. The path of desert dry skin mottled with sores burned alarmingly red on his upper arm where the last time Maki checked it had been clear. She hoped this wasn't a sign that his Shingles had gotten worse elsewhere.

"Good morning, Mr. Takumi. This here is a resident, Ms..."

"Kagayaku*." Nico smiled brightly.

Maki resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "Miss Kagayaku, who is working with me today."

"Hiya!" Nico greeted. "So what's wrong with you?"

If Maki hadn't heard it with her own ears she might not have thought that _anyone_ would be dumb enough to say that to a patient. Not with Nico's excited, almost gleeful voice. She looked to Nico with pleading eyes, but the girl seemed intent on ignoring her. Maki pinched the bridge of her nose. This all felt like a nightmare she needed to wake up from. But instead of what she expected - a sharp reply, an outraged curse, anger and disbelief in one yell - the lively sound of a deep guffaw filled the small room. Maki glanced up at the man in her own brand of disbelief.

"What _isn't_ wrong with me, little missy? Hahaha."

"He has Shingles." Maki turned to Nico, trying to warn the woman with the expression on her face. "And speaking of that, could I please see your rash?" she motioned for the man to lift his gown. Red, splotchy, stucco skin yelled at the two women. There was a stench coming from layers of ointment and dead skin, strata of medicine and disease. Thankfully, even with the spread to his arm, the rash on his torso appeared to be lessening some. Nico recoiled at the sight, and Maki again shot her a dirty look. A languid chuckle raised itself slowly out of the man's chest.

"I'm not sure if this profession is for you if _this_ grosses you out." Mr. Takumi directed at Nico.

The barb revitalized the idol. She leaned forward to get a better look at how Mkaki was inspecting the sores. "I don't know, Mr. Takumi. It's hard to tell where the Shingles end and your gross old man skin begins." she prodded, smiling through her words.

There wasn't even a pause before the older man laughed again, but Maki's eyes bulged out of her head. She went entirely ignored by both Nico and the patient, who chuckled at one another like old buddies. Heat in Maki's throat smoldered with reprimands and insults, but she forced it down to burn in her stomach instead.

"This one's looking a bit better, Mr. Takumi." the doctor said. "Have the nurses helped you apply the ointment?"

"You bet. And it's a pain too." he laughed. "But if it helps, it helps."

Maki urged Nico up then, the grip on the girl's arm tighter than it should've been. "Then I'll be seeing you. Have a good day."

As the man settled down, avoiding his fiery rash like potholes, he waved at the girls. The squeak of shoes on the waxed floor while people passed them in the hall grated on Maki's nerves more than usual. The hospital was warm - very warm - a holdover from the long winter heating that was growing more unwelcome on days when the clammy breeze drew sweat from pores and the sun sent heat from behind constant rain clouds. Everything was getting under Maki's skin, though she had a feeling it all originated from one small package. Maki noticed Nico looking at her with nothing but expectation - expectation of praise, or of reprimands, or maybe something to do with the way her eyes flickered to the doctor's lips, drawn as if under a spell.

"Nico, I don't know how _any_ of that worked out but please - _please_ try not to say such stupid things to patients. What would've happened if he hadn't laughed?" Maki leaned into the girl, trapping her against the wail, but at that Nico raised up on her tiptoes and leaned just as harshly forward into the doctor's personal space. She grinned, a shark setting smelling blood. "Are you challenging me?"

"What? That's the exact opposite of what I'm doing. Don't be an idiot."

"Watch, Maki. You won't see a single patient wave goodbye to us today without a smile on their face."

And just like that she marched off to the next name on the list Nozomi had given her. To Maki's immense, almost disbelieving surprise, Nico managed to keep her word. They went from Mr. Takumi's to the room of Rin Hoshizora. The smile that was incessantly beaming from the patient seemed to have fled and her shoulders sagged low. Her eyes were glued to the phone in her hand, the light from which reflected coldly onto her normally warm face.

Maki knocked on the steel threshold of the door. "Hello, Ms. Hoshizora."

Rin didn't answer. She instead twisted her whole body to Maki. Her cast-covered arm and leg were motionless. The doctor shook off the cold atmosphere of the room and moved to Rin's bedside. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Nico scanning the room with a a kind of clinical analysis she didn't expect, though in Nico's defense the scanning was so subtle and quick Maki almost hadn't noticed it. On the chair beside Rin's bed was a cat plushie, and the girl's hoodie hung on a hook by the door. It had fake ears attached to the lime green hood, and a tail on the bottom that swung slightly in the cross-draft of the half opened window and the fully opened door.

"Are you feeling alright, Rin? Is it your arm? Your leg?"

Rin shook her head. "It's my...it's my..."

"Is it your kitty?" Nico asked. Rin nodded quickly.

"Y-yeah. My new kitty had to stay over night at the vets to have some tests run. I'm so scared. What if we can't keep it? What if it's sick?"

Maki watched Nico out of the corner of her eye. She hadn't mentioned anything before about Rin's cats, and she hadn't even introduced the 'resident' yet.

"Look on the bright side, Rin." Nico smiled wide enough for both girls. "Once these tests prove your cat is fine, she'll be there right when you get back home."

"But...but how will I know if it's fine? What if it isn't?"

"You just have to believe it is! All of these bad thoughts won't help at all. The more you believe, the more what you want will come true!"

Rin sniffled. Like a dimmer light her smile grew slowly brighter. "Yeah, I'll do that!"

"Ms. Kagayaku." Nico held out her hand. "Nice to meet you!"

That was how the rest of the first half of the day passed. Nico really did have some sort of gift for eliciting a smile, for summoning happiness from even the most morose of patients. A teenage boy slowly recovering from Melanoma found his grin when Nico talked with him about soccer. The young mother in 405, who recently found herself suffering fainting spells, smiled like a schoolgirl at Nico's stories about helping to raise her own siblings. Maki discovered something almost supernatural in the way Nico could pick out one item in a room, or one word falling off a patient's tongue, or one look in their eye and draw out the burning happiness in their hearts like an experienced camper starting a fire from a spark. This was the power of an idol - it almost worried the doctor to think about what it would take to do that to a concert hall full of people. The skill it would require to form many hearts into one, and then one heart into an inferno of bright, shining joy.

It was after a string of patients that the two stood in front of a beverage vending machine. The machine held all of the usual suspects: cans of coffee in strengths ranging from midnight to might-as-well-be-milk, various teas both sweetened and un-, and a collection of fruit juices made up the selection. A new initiative in the hospital had removed soda from the machines the year before, to ever decreasing complaints, which seemed to mean that the idea was working in the isolated world of the hospital. Maki bought cans of coffee for herself and Nico - a midnight and a milk respectively. They stood beside one another in front of the vending machine in a featureless corner of the floor.

"I almost hate to say it," Maki watched the foot traffic passing before her rather than look at Nico. "But you were right."

"Oh? Is the good doctor admitting defeat?"

"Defeat? I didn't even actually challenge - _anyway_ , I wanted to show you something. As a...condition of my loss, I guess. D-don't make me regret it."

Maki informed Nozomi that she was taking her hour-long lunch break, and then she lead Nico into the elevator down to where the first floor PT wing was. They didn't say a word for the entirety of the elevator ride, though they didn't need to speak to communicate just what they were feeling at that moment. Maki, her face dusted with an unwanted blush, stood stiffly at a small distance from Nico; her eyes moved over to the girl in betrayal of the doctor's internal orders. She kept her hands clenched in her coat pockets. Every time Nico smirked her way, like a child who was told she could have one item in a toy store but planned to get two, Maki bristled.

They arrived at the first floor and without a word Maki lead Nico to a long hallway off of the PT wing and up to an unoccupied room near a window closing off the hallway. Both women stopped before the door that Maki opened. The floor of the room was covered with a thin, hard, and scratchy drab carpet like one might find in a church. Soundproofing materials insulated the walls, and on the outside these were covered by posters full of information on musical instruments and techniques. A collection of music stands, hardshell instrument cases, and related odds and ends were stacked against the wall. They held the distinct impression of disuse; a cover of dust lay over most of the items, while the wall behind was marked by the faint outline of unmoving objects the sun couldn't bleach. One high window let in the day's cool gray light and on the wall across from that was an old Casio keyboard on a stand. Its keys were scratched and smudged in a way that attested to loving use, though it, like everything else, appeared abandoned.

"This is the music therapy room." Maki introduced. "Or, it was. It's been some time since we've had the budget to keep it up and running. My father started the project after I proposed it when I was in high school." a dreamy look came upon her face. "I spent years in here helping patients learn to play the piano as an after-school volunteer job."

Nico gave Maki the first genuine smile she'd ever shared with the doctor. "That's actually really nice of you. I wouldn't have expected it."

"What's that supposed to mean?!"

But the smaller woman had already wandered into the room, and the doctor followed after. "Nothing, really. I'm just surprised you had the kind of patience it takes to help other people - in a non-medical sense, I mean."

" _Anyway_ ," Maki shook her head, scowling, and sat herself on the piano bench. The instrument before her was nearly as dear to her as the one in her apartment, though far less maintained. She ran a finger over the dusty plastic and sighed. The ending of the music therapy program never failed to fill her with an irritated sadness, a frustration budding on loss like a skinned knee after a lost race. She placed her hands on the home keys and her heart filled with memories of sick patients, sweltering afternoons, cacophonous music, and the strange happiness that formed in spite of all of that. "I thought I'd play something for you. To, you know, show my side of that argument we had yesterday." Maki scooted over on the bench. She kept her eyes from roaming by pouring over a dog-eared book of classical compositions.

"I wonder if that's the whole reason." Nico said as she slid next to Maki. Their sides, their thighs, were close enough to nearly touch. But in that infinitesimal space between them, barely tight enough for a breeze to pass through, such a strong desire to press herself against the woman swelled in Maki that the doctor adjusted herself, too theatrically, to create just one or two more inches of space between them - and only to prove that she _could_ , that she had even that small amount of self control.

"What other reason could there be?" She frowned.

"Maybe you're rewarding me for a job well done." Nico tried, smirking. "Or maybe this is your way of flirting. Do you bring all of your cute patients down here, Dr. Nishikino?"  
"Shut it." Maki ordered. Her expression was that of a thief caught red-handed. "Just listen. If you can't appreciate the genius of this song and smile, I see no reason to respect idols as true artists."

After allowing Nico to settle, and after warming up her own fingers for a moment, Maki launched into Beethoven's "Pathetique". Her fingers sought out each key like an arrow hitting its mark while she read over the notes. Though she was vaguely aware both of the sheet music and of Nico beside her, Maki retreated into herself as she often did while playing. The notes paraded before her eyes, the melody wound its way around her veins, the rhythm shaped her heart's, and the keys became her bones. The beautiful piece filled the room like sunlight, falling into corners and replacing the shadows in both the room and her heart with its very radiant existence.

But somewhere in the middle of the song shadows appeared to reclaim their lost domain. The silence beyond the music drained from the room, and even in her self-centered concentration Maki knew something was wrong. She couldn't recognize it at first, not until she felt weak tremors beside her. She slowed down and then stopped playing all together when the whole scene finally clicked in her head.

"Nico, are you crying?"

She sniffled. "No. No, I'm not." the girl argued. Her voice was heavy with tears, like she was struggling to speak past a stone in her throat. "I just - " she stopped speaking. Her head hung low, but her fists were clenched at her side. Maki stared at the girl in expectant patience, though not without a clammy sliver of anxiety. This was the last thing she expected Nico to do; complaining about how bored the music made her feel seemed far more likely.

"I've been talking about - about," Nico sniffled again. "Getting out of here and going back to being an idol. A-and how I want to bring people smiles again. But - " the girl still wouldn't allow herself to cry. Maki watched Nico bite the inside of her cheek and the doctor's heart filled with a kind of desperate helplessness it had never known before. "But they dropped me. 10 years, my first major issue, and they dropped me. I've been an idol since I was 17, Maki!" the girl in question was frozen in hesitation, a living block of ice. "It's like they were just waiting for an excuse! I...I just don't know what to do now, and I _hate_ it. I hate that all of this happened."

In that moment Maki didn't know what to do either. The rest of the hospital around them might as well have vanished. Her beeper stayed quiet in her pocket, afraid to speak up, but the drumbeat of her heart was loud enough. With stiff limbs like an old tree struggling to bend in the wind, Maki wrapped an arm around the other girl and pulled her in close, tight to her chest. Nico laid her head on the doctor's shoulder and turned her face away. Maki held her head there lightly but firmly, and then wrapped her other arm around Nico's slender back. She didn't know what to say. She said nothing at all. The left shoulder of her lab coat was damp, but if Nico really was crying it was silently. Only the tremor of her petite body betrayed her. Whatever Maki had been attempting to prove with her music was lost to the fleeting moments of the past. But in the present, she found herself trying to forget that Nico was famous. That Nico was a _patient_.

"I'm not crying." Nico whispered harshly into Maki's shoulder. Time fell like the dust motes in the air of the forgotten music therapy room. Nico might've spoken moments into the embrace or minutes later. "Idol's don't cry. They smile, so that everyone else can too."

"You're not an idol anymore," Maki answered, but before her words could be misunderstood added, "You can cry all you need now. Let it all out. Don't hold it in, like an idiot."

The intimacy of the moment caught up to Maki slowly, like uneven packets of data coming through a bad connection. Her cheek was pressed closely against Nico's soft black hair; the way her sweet shampoo filled Maki's lungs was a precious kind of punishment. And in her arms Nico's body fit near perfectly. The smaller woman's worn-out, tired limbs still had the strength to embrace Maki in return, and clung as desperately as if the doctor was a true lifeline. Maki closed her eyes. She was glad she couldn't see Nico's face. Just the sight of those tear-ringed eyes and the alluring pout would have pushed her over the edge.

It was a bittersweet blessing when Nico's phone went off. Maki released the girl hastily and looked down to stare at the piano keys. She searched for answers in all of that binary black and white but found none - most questions in life were harder than a simple yes or no. And there was nothing simple about _whatever_ it was that was happening between Nico and herself.

"That's my alarm to get ready for today's PT appointment." Nico pocketed her phone. A flower-bud smile bloomed on her face when she turned to Maki. "Guess I should go get changed."

"I hope you're doing just what Umi instructs, in _and_ out of the treatments." Maki answered instead. She unsuccessfully hid her tomato-red face behind her tomato-red hair. The pout she wore was exaggerated and forced. "Regardless of what you do after you're - _probably_ \- released on Sunday, you're going to want your body to be in better shape."

Maki watched Nico's grin grow wider under her puffy eyes. Some traitorous part of the doctor's heart clenched. "Really worried about me, aren't you doc?"

"What are you trying to say? I'm just doing my job."

They stepped out of the door one after the other. For the second time, Maki didn't know what to say and so she opted for silence instead. She began to walk ahead to return to work, to put all of this behind her, until she heard Nico whisper "Thank you" under her breath. Maki didn't trust her own treasonous tongue to control itself, and gave a throaty "Hm" in response. She purposefully chose a different elevator than the one Nico stepped into, though they were headed to the same floor.

The doctor nearly turned on her heel when she reached the nurse's station on the fourth floor. Nozomi's mysterious sparkling eyes added to her knowing smirk as she sat like she was expecting Maki's still flushed face. Like she could hear her marching drum heart over the layered noise of the hospital's beeps and voices, shoe squeaks and flat-lines, crying children and alarms. Maki spied the pile of tarot cards the woman always carried under stacks of forms and files littering Nozomi's desk. A day didn't go by without Maki seeing Nozomi with that deceptively friendly grin convincing patients, visitors, nurses, and doctors to get a reading, and than a true, genuine smile as she used the results to help lead these people down new paths in life.

"Nozomi, I'm back from lunch." she tried to keep her voice even. She could feel her cheeks still burning, and knowing this only seemed to make the heat grow hotter in an embarrassingly noticeable loop.

"Got it. I know you couldn't check on Ruby Kurosawa earlier with your new "resident", but she's just got back from those tests you ordered. I put the results in the chart in her room."

"Thanks, I'll check it out later." she began to walk away.

"Wait, Maki," the doctor turned. "Would you like a reading?" Nozomi shuffled the deck in her hands without looking down.

"I've refused every time you've asked, Nozomi. Now's no different."

"There's a very special patient who has already made _quite_ the difference."

"Nozomi - " she warned.

"Won't you try it just once? It was thanks to this that I ended up with my dear Eli."

"And what does any of that have to do with me? I'm not...looking for anyone."

"Because you've already found someone?" the woman bit her lip to try and contain her smirk.

"What are you trying to imply here, Toujo?"

"One card, Maki. One reading."

The doctor let out a loud sigh, but surprised even herself and finally gave in. It'd be better than having Nozomi bug her for the rest of the day. She ignored the fluttering of her heart, the almost child-like nervousness that reminded her of the hopeful apprehension she used to get when she pulled fortunes at shrines on New Year's Day. "Make it quick."

With a blinding grin Nozimi set up the cards, went through the proper motions, and eventually revealed the final card. Though Maki expected to see something like 'The Lovers' - a clear sign that Nozomi was messing around, the card she was shown instead was something she didn't know the meaning of.

"Oh, an upright 'Fool'. _Very_ interesting, Maki"

"Are you calling me an idiot?"

"No, no." Nozomi chuckled. "It's just, this is quite the turn of events."

"I have a feeling you'd say that no matter what card you pulled." Maki crossed her arms.

"I'm not playing around, Maki. This one represents the beginning of a new journey. A chance at great personal growth. An experience you'll learn from - a fresh start you'll be open to despite yourself."

"Is that so?" she quirked a single eyebrow.

"Don't sound so disbelieving." the girl shuffled the tarot cards back into a plastic sleeve and pushed the deck into a pocket of her scrubs. "There are some things in life we simply can't explain."

"I'm going to go do my job. Which, by the way, is all about medical science that we _can_ explain."

"Don't shy away from new opportunities!" Maki heard her call as she walked away. She avoided looking at her own reflection in the waxed floor on her path to see Ruby Kurosawa.

Later on, far into the night, Maki collapsed onto her love seat - the leather of which mumbled a protest in friction's voice. The rest of her apartment besides the living room was dark and quiet. On the coffee table lay cold, half-eaten leftovers. Though the doctor squeezed her eyes shut, sleep just wouldn't come. The day had been long, and that intimate moment somehow longer, as if the hourglass's sand fell in slow, single-grained motions rather than a river torrent. Nico filled every corner of her mind and Maki cursed her lack of self-control. Nico was famous, with all of the popularity and romantic options that entailed. Nico was a _patient_. And not only was Maki a doctor, she was _her_ doctor. Her blood simmered. She was only hurting herself with these thoughts, and she knew it. Maki briefly looked to her phone on the coffee table and considered calling her close friend Kotori Minami - considered spilling everything that was weighing on her shoulders like the world, but this desire, and even her prickling frustration was overcome by bone deep exhaustion. Somehow, after years of training and a nearly a year on the job, the long, tiring hours still hit her like a truck. Her bed called to her, but her body didn't respond. On the couch Maki tossed and turned in restless sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Kagayaku (輝く): to shine, to glitter, to sparkle  
> Considering that the characters are speaking Japanese in the context of the fic, Maki's reaction is due to the on-the-nose-ness of Nico's choice of a fake name. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!


	5. Thursday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There really isn't an end to my appreciation for all of those who have read my work, and especially for those who have chosen to respond in any way at all.
> 
> Enjoy~

The unstoppable tremor in her hands quaked her coffee into violent black waves. The wooden bench beneath Maki was wet, but she didn't feel it. She didn't feel much outside of herself at the moment; not the hazy sun beaming through gauzy fog, not the gusts disturbing her hair, not the low hanging branch occasionally rubbing her head whenever the wind blew. It was all she could do to keep the coffee from climbing back up her throat with a vengeance. In her despondent daze she barely recognized the woman sitting beside her, though what eventually tipped her off was the force of the woman's arctic eyes looking into, and not just at, her. That, and the neat blond ponytail hanging down the back of her head.

"Eli." Maki said, keeping her voice as stripped of emotion as she could handle.

"Is something wrong?" the blond woman ignored greetings and shot straight to the point. There was no use in slinging out hints and clues, in beating around the proverbial bush. Eli didn't back down, and the doctor knew it. She was dressed in a stylish business skirt and top that expressed her confidence in its seriousness and sharpness.

Still, Maki ignored the question. She stared at the fish in the pond before her, colorful and dull at once like an aged painting as they aimlessly traversed the clear, colorless water denied blue or green-gray with the lack of sky on such a hazy day.

"If it has something to do with work, I'll just go ask Nozomi." she persisted. The threat was not empty and both women were aware of that. Maki took in a deep drowning breath, heavy as if she'd been holding it for days. She sat up and crossed her legs at the knee, but kept the cold coffee held in both hands before her like she was praying. Eli waited patiently. Her eyes never once left Maki.

"This young patient of mine - just a teenager - had a heart attack an hour ago. I was there - " Maki cleared her throat and pouted for a moment. When she spoke again it was with a kind of quickness, a kind of anger floating on sadness like a fire burning on top of the cold choppy sea. "And she's okay, _for now_ , but God, Eli, the whole thing is awful. And my own reaction!"

"Maki - "

"I mean, what would my father say?! I work in a hospital; _of course_ bad things happen. I've been in hospitals my whole life. It's - it's _unprofessional_ for me to take this so personally. For it to leave me a wreck here like some little kid!" with two fingers the doctor pinched the bridge of her nose. Just as spontaneously as she started speaking she stopped. On the ground before them a small bird twittered and hopped about, oblivious and unkind to human drama.

"I don't think empathy is a bad thing, really."

"I froze. For just a moment, before I grabbed the paddles, I froze in fear. That _second_ could have meant the difference between that innocent girl's life and death. _That's_ a problem, Eli. And it put it everything into perspective - how unnaturally lucky I've been. How long the hammer's been waiting to fall. I've been a doctor for what, almost a year? Not to mention a resident for who knows how long. And yet, I never dealt with a life-or-death situation like that. A patient's never died on me. And now that one almost did? I was entirely unprepared. I've been lucky. I've been _playing_ doctor this whole time. But - " she asked angrily "But what now?"

When Eli didn't answer Maki looked at the girl out of the corner of her eye. Eli stared at the bird still hopping along on the verdant cut grass. The small brown bird pecked the ground for a worm but came up empty each time. Still, it never quit. It didn't know disappointment and didn't understand failure.

"It might be cliché, but I think you just have to take this as a learning experience." Eli finally said with a decisive edge to her voice, like that of an unquestioned leader. Maki found herself suddenly feeling bad for anyone who worked under the woman and didn't share that same conviction. "You might be right. It might be unprofessional for you to be so deeply affected. But if you can't change that." she looked Maki right in the eyes for this aside, "And you shouldn't - empathy is a good thing - you just have to make sure you're prepared next time. There's nothing else to it."

"It's inevitable, though. Someone's going to die under my care one day, and - "

"And you'll have to accept that. But the patient didn't die this time, did they?"

"No. She'll...she'll need a new heart, for sure now, but - "

"Then focus on that. Get her that heart." before Maki could answer, Eli's phone alerted her. "Ah, Nozomi's on her break, finally." She stood up and placed a warm hand on Maki's shoulder. The redhead didn't look up, but the tension in the muscles of her shoulders spiked for a moment before plummeting under the care of that simple gesture. "I'm sure you have other patients who need you. Perk up, okay? We can talk about this the next time Nozomi and I have you over for dinner. Which, now that I think about it, should be next week, no?"

"Yeah." Maki managed. "Thanks."

"Thank me by getting back in there."

Maki watched Eli walk confidently into the hospital and then fade into the crowd. Even with those decidedly foreign attributes - the height and hair and eyes of the cold north - she was lost among the busy corridors on her way up to her partner. Maki had never been the jealous type, but couldn't deny the pang of envy at having a person to cling to, like Eli and Nozomi were for one another. She took a deep breath and pushed everything - jealousy, fear, anger, worry - out of her head and willed her body to return from the salvation of a lunch break back to the job she was now somewhat afraid of, like the uneasiness of approaching one's pet dog after it bit at your hand. She left the mildew smell of a damp spring day and headed into her hospital.

The very first room she returned to was Ruby Kurosawa's. After a warning knock Maki stepped inside and closed the door quietly behind her. It was cold in the room, but that seemed like the least of anyone's worry.

"How is she?" Maki asked, her voice low and even. She tried to keep the fear out of her eyes. Beside the bed, closer now than ever before, Dia Kurosawa clutched her sleeping sister's hand tightly in her own. Though tear stains still shined on her cheeks, Dia's eyes were burning in steely resolution, in sharp indignation at the world. She didn't answer at first. Maki watched the girl open her mouth and close it, but Dia spoke before she could ask again.

"Sleeping." Dia answered in a voice like a judge bringing down the full extent of the law.

"We have to discuss her options - well, her _option_ when she awakens."

When Maki finally turned to Ruby - she had avoided doing so deliberately up until then - she couldn't help but notice just how terrible the girl looked. Her cherry hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat and her face was troubled in sleep, pale as a sheet. Maki watched the heart monitor trace out the weak life in the girl's veins, which she was sure that Dia had been doing for the whole time, but tried her hardest to focus solely on the numbers. The objective, truthful numbers, free of worry and sorrow. Though she tried to ignore it as best as she could there was the slightest smell of vomit in the room. Maki supposed Dia would deny it if she dared to ask.

"Tomorrow." Dia ordered. "We''ll do it tomorrow. Hasn't my little sister suffered enough today?"

"...She has." it hurt Maki to admit. She knew she shouldn't be guilty - Ruby's cardiomyopathy was not the doctor's fault - but she felt it anyway. "But we can't put it off any longer. She's going to have to get on that list as soon as she can." Maki swallowed hard and then looked Dia in the eyes. "I'm going to get her as high up on that list as I can. Trust me."

Dia nodded, but looked down at her sister. "Thank you, Dr. Nishikino. For what you did this morning."

"I only did my job." she answered. A small seed of relief sprouted in the guilty soil of her heart, though she didn't feel like she deserved it at all. She bid Dia goodbye, and left the sisters together in the cold room. From there Maki stopped in on patients she had to bypass that morning in favor of saving the teen's life. Mr. Takumi was improving. His rashes and sores burned a less fiery red, closer to a pale apple than a firetruck. He seemed to be in his usual jovial mood, but Maki supposed that that was probably the painkillers.

"You're recovering slowly but surely." she told him while covering his body up once more with the hospital gown. The old man grinned with a boyish smile that still looked natural on his unshaven face. "It sure took long enough." then, after a laugh that was more of a clownish cough he asked. "Say, where's that little resident from yesterday?"

The words nearly stopped Maki in her tracks. She slowly replaced the patient's chart at the foot of the bed before answering. "She's been assigned to a different doctor for today." she lied. It was easier than letting herself think about the woman, who had been the last thing on her mind after the events of the morning. Easier than letting _Nico_ crowd her thoughts at the same time she was trying to block out all of the doubts and fears that still laid claim to her heart. It was like being found by hungry wolves; a lie was her best bet to duck beneath the lunges, though it didn't offer an escape.

Things were the same with Rin. The girl's mother was in the room when Maki arrived, tidying up her daughter's belongings. Rin's smile could have lit up the entire floor what with how bright it was.

"You'll never guess the good news, doc!"

"You're kitten is fine?" the doctor tried. There hadn't been much that Rin spoke about otherwise.

"Yes! Exactly! It's amazing!"

Rin's enthusiasm was infectious. Despite herself, Maki could feel a smile forming on her lips. And in the corner of the room, Rin's mother was beaming as well.

"Well then, I've got more good news for you." Maki offered. "You can go home today."

"That's wonderful." Mrs. Hoshizora exclaimed. "Thank you, Dr. Nishikino."

"Just return in six weeks and we'll see if we can remove the casts then." Maki said. "At home, keep your limbs elevated, and try not to move around so much for the first few weeks."

"That's going to be hard for my daughter." Rin's mother laughed. Maki felt her smile grow. She could only imagine what a fully-mobile Rin was like.

"Oh!" Rin exclaimed, remembering something important. "Where's Dr. Kagayaku?"

It took most of Maki's self-control not to scowl at the girl's name. Her plan to put that all out of her mind was being thwarted left and right. "She's with another doctor today."

"When you see her, can you tell her about my kitty?"

"Yeah, I'll do that." Maki nodded. She watched for a moment as Mrs. Hoshizora went from tidying to collecting Rin's things, before wishing the girl good luck.

Maki herself suffered from just the opposite. Every patient she'd visited who had been in her care the day before asked where Nico was, and why she wasn't with Maki. Each time she was asked Maki felt like she was being poked by a sharp pencil - not painful so much as it was irritating. She used the same lie again and again until, for the slightest moment when she stood outside Nico's door - the last patient she was going to see for the day - she believed it herself.

At least it seemed like Nico was finally taking her advice seriously. Rather than pacing or playing with her brother or finding any excuse to be out of bed, the girl was lying with her arms beneath her head and a troubled expression on her face. A sticky fear settled in the pit of Maki's stomach at the same time as a fluttering lightness filled her lungs. The unpleasant sensation was like being tied to an anchor and a thousand balloons at once.

"Nico." she half-greeted, half-complained.

"Maki," the girl answered without opening her eyes. Maki all but prayed that the girl would stay like that and make the visit _that_ much easier. Nico was still in her hospital gown, but on top of that she wore here pink cotton cardigan. There was a small pile of water bottles in the recycle bin.

"How are you feeling today?" she kicked the bin lightly. "It looks like you're finally taking my advice."

"I've never been better." Nico humphed, with her eyes now open to glare at Maki. "You, on the other hand, look awful."

"Thanks. That's just what I wanted to hear."

"No, really Maki," Nico sat up cross-legged. "Your hands are shaking and everything. What happened?"

The doctor cursed her traitorous hands and slipped them into her coat pockets. "I'm not at liberty to discuss it. And anyway, I'm here to check up on you and your progress with Umi. Forget about me."

"As if I could." Nico said, mostly under her breath. She looked out the window of the room into the hazy early evening. The balloons and the anchor pulled stronger in separate directions with more force than the doctor thought she could handle. She chose to ignore the comment for her own mental health.

Maki tried to be thoroughly objective as she studied Nico outwardly for signs of recovery. Color had returned to Nico's skin, luster to her hair, and an alluring fullness to her lips. The bags had mostly disappeared from beneath those ruby eyes, and even the slight movements of her body as she turned towards the window and absentmindedly stretched lacked the resistance and unconscious avoidance they had at the beginning of the week. Most of that stiffness, anyway, if the barely hidden cringe on Nico's face meant anything. Maki walked over and lightly grasped NIco's arm, feeling for the strain. She wasn't entirely positive, but even that felt as though it was healing. Nico didn't turn from the window but the doctor watched her eyes following every minute movement Maki made. She reached for Nico's thigh, but stopped with her hand hanging in the air. "May I?"

"Go ahead." she said sourly.

Maki wrapped her hand gently around Nico's thigh the same way she did with her arm, though echoes of that wonderful suppleness under her fingers were hard - so, so hard to ignore. The silence in the room weighed heavily on Maki. It grew more irritating each second it grabbed from between them.

"You said I looked awful, but you're in a bad mood too."

"It's all settling in." Nico grumbled. "The end of...of my career. The end of who I was. I thought I got it all out yesterday, but now I'm just angry. Angry and lost." she glared at Maki. "And it seems like _someone_ doesn't trust me the way I trusted her. That doesn't feel all that good either, you know."

"Nico, this isn't about me."

"How am I supposed to feel good about sharing, about getting over things, when you won't do the same?"

"I'm your doctor and you're my patient. You're not my therapist."

By then Maki had removed her hands from Nico and crossed her arms over her chest. The conversation was getting to her, but even worse was the nagging in her chest to actually open up to the former idol. She'd hardly known Nico for more than a few days, but there was something in her eyes, something in her inner strength, that Maki was absolutely sure was trustworthy. In a way, she knew that the issue lied with her and not with Nico.

"So now I can't be concerned for a friend? I'm an idol at heart, Maki. What I want is to make people smile. Even you. Even now."

Maki closed her eyes for moment. She could hear her heart beating faster than she wanted it to. She thought she could hear Nico's too, like some distant, nostalgic music. And she could hear the words in her head leave her lips before she was powerless to stop them.

"There was a bad heart attack. I almost lost a patient today, alright? It's not really your business."

"So I guess you have a heart in there somewhere after all." Nico answered, but the words lacked any real poison. They were just filler, just static in the distance between the women. The distance closing each second without either noticing. They moved closer with every word, with every breath.

"I never implied that I was heartless. Being a doctor just means knowing which heartstrings to sever, and when."

"That seems more like a surgeon's job." Maki felt Nico's near whisper on her own lips. The woman's breath ticked her face with an exhilarating fog.

But the banter ended then and there when Maki felt Nico's lips crash against her own, pushing hard and hot like Nico was a fire she could embrace, and then the woman's hand reached behind Maki's head to pull the doctor closer. Some small, screaming part of Maki's realized she was kissing _back_. She pressed her own lips harder against Nico's in a struggle where both were winners and losers. Her own hands grasped at Nico's hips and the back of her neck. One of the women - she hoped it wasn't herself, but she was less than sure - moaned into the kiss. Her mind was going blank. She could hardly acknowledge that her tongue and Nico's were already fighting, evading, _invading_ one another's mouths and how the infinitesimal gaps in the kiss for breath still lasted like too long, much too long, an infinity of time in which Maki felt more than recognized her body's need for Nico.

She pressed her mouth hard against Nico's again, and this time pushed the woman down in a gentle, fluid motion against the bed, trapping Nico between her hands. Her breath quickened. Nico was just so cute beneath her that the doctor couldn't stand it. Maki moaned softly when Nico brushed a hand against her cheek in a soft caress. It was then that she felt the scratchy plastic of Nico's bright orange patient bracelet scrape against the back of her neck and once more everything fell into place. Like a plug being pulled, Maki clicked off in an instant.

"Oh my God." she shot up, backing away from the woman, the act, the scene of the crime and almost colliding with the chair beside the bed. She smoothed down her hair with nervous strokes and held a hand against her manic heart. The balloons that were tied to it popped, and the anchor dragged her down completely.

"What?" Nico looked impatient.

"I'm so sorry." Maki forced out. "That was - that never should've happened. I just - you -"

"You sound crazy. We're two consenting adults. What's a kiss between us?"

"I'm your _doctor_. You're my _patient_. Ethics _alone_ dictate something's wrong. I could be fired if I'm caught, or worse! There are _very_ clear rules about this!"

"We weren't caught, not by anyone. And I'm _obviously_ not going to tell anybody." Nico turned from her position on the bed and sat with her legs danging off, leaning towards Maki's flinching form. "Why don't we just close the door and - "

"No. No way. I have a responsibility. I have rules to follow. This is...this is why I froze today. If I can't control myself..." The doctor bit her bottom lip hard. She looked everywhere but at Nico. "No, Nico - I mean, Ms. Yazawa. I'm sorry. You're doing fine. I'm going to - I have to go."

At the call of her formal name hurt flashed across Nico's face, and for a split second Maki regretted that more than anything else. But she still made her escape, all but running out the door, down the empty hall, and into a bathroom stall where she did whatever it took to regain her composure and still the machine gun beating of her heart, though a part of her knew that the longing-turned-pain would persist long after. Would, perhaps, persist indefinitely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!


	6. Friday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to everyone who has read and enjoyed this so far, and especially to those who've responded. I can't explain enough what it means to me.
> 
> That said, as of now the final chapter - an epilogue - still has to be finished. I focused my time on typing and editing the main body of the story, and the epilogue fell to the wayside. I may not have it out immediately after chapter 8, but I'm going to aim for getting it out sometime in the middle of July.
> 
> Enjoy~

Maki avoided her own eyes in the mirror. She was fixing her hair into its usual shoulder-length waves, having already painted on the scant amount of make-up she wore, but each time she passed through her own stare something stabbed at her chest. The feelings from the night before - the joy, the lust, the panic, the burning shame - insulated all of her movements. They were a buffer, a fog, that was difficult to even move through. Each pass of the brush through her hair was slow and mindless, sloth-like.

This feeling didn't leave when she arrived at work. She entered through the glass doors with the brushed silver handles and walked down the marble-floored main reception center. There were people milling about, patients and doctors and visitors alike, but this wasn't a waiting room or the emergency room; everyone seemed to have a reason for passing through, and no one stayed long. Maki waved absentmindedly at the owner of the gift shop-slash-conviencence-store she saw each morning, though she didn't know the seemingly kind old man's name and had probably never said anything more than hello to him. Rather than heading to get her rounds, Maki walked to the office of the hospital's director.

The door to the luxurious office space was open when she arrived. Sitting and reading files behind glass desk, which was accented with chrome legs and supports, was Mari Ohara. The woman was in her mid-thirties and naturally blond, through like Eli, she stood out more for her natural beauty than her foreign features. Maki's father had once been the director, but that was before the Ohara family bought their large share of the hospital when he finally retired. The loss of the position from her father's retirement was a sore spot for Maki; it had been an eventuality she tried hard to ignore. She promised herself more than once to eventually reclaim that title for her family. Maki stood before the desk and cleared her throat. Mari had not risen her head when the doctor walked in.

"Good morning, Director."

"Oh, Maki!" the woman looked up quickly and flashed a Hollywood smile. If she knew that Maki's sights were set on her position, she had never let that fact be known. "Morning. What brings you here?" Mari wore a form-fitting white dress with a deep neckline. Similarly provocative-yet-tasteful clothing made up just about everything Maki had ever seen her wear.

"I had a question about the forms I need to get a patient onto the organ transplant list." she crossed her arms but tried to keep any impatience from her voice. "In my professional opinion, it's a necessary operation." Maki paused and sucked in a reluctant breath. "Of course, I'd like to ask first for approval."

Mari leaned forward in her seat while Maki watched her cross her legs underneath the table. "I suppose I can accept your professional opinion, Maki." she wore a candy smirk that never seemed to leave her lips. "Though I would like to see the patient's file later on, and discuss it with you over dinner."

Maki fought back the urge to roll her eyes and scowl. She was sure she'd heard that the woman was taken - supposedly by some famous female diver - and in any case she knew that Mari liked messing with people for her own amusement, or for some hidden intentions she never revealed. Her words often dripped with double meanings and the fact that she knew more than she let on.

"I'm a busy woman, Ms. Ohara. I'll send down the file and some notes later."

"And I'll send up the necessary forms." she never stopped smiling. "Is that all? Any other patients I need to know about?"

The briefest of impulses stuck in Maki's throat to ask a _hypothetical_ question about doctor/patient relationships. "No, thank you."

Without another word she left the office and headed up to the fourth floor. The whole hospital seemed extra active that day, which was almost never a good thing, all things considered. Like clockwork, nurses and doctors rotated from room to room at the beck and call of invisible cogs. The particular music of a medical facility - its beeps, squeaks, and taps, it's ringing and groaning - filled Maki's ears. At the nurses' station Nozomi was a beacon of peace in the midst of chaos, handling files and calls, overwhelmed family members and surly doctors with a tranquil and fluid efficiency. Maki saw her glance at the framed picture of Eli beneath the lip off the desk every once in a while; she worked even better after each glance.

Maki covered the uncertainty of her steps with the normal no-nonsense mask she wore on her way to Ruby's room. Today was the day she'd have to deliver Bad News with capital letters, and try to inspire even a shred of hope in one fell stroke. Her hands clenched into fists. She peeked into the room before walking in. Ruby was awake and was reading from some idol magazine. Dia's head rested on her sister's lap and she sat in the chair in an awkward position. It was the first time she'd seen the older sister sleep at all; a small part of her had almost seen the girl as a sleepless vigilant, a tireless knight. But even Dia was human. She was still a young woman herself. She walked in slowly after running a nervous hand down her shirt to clear away non-existent wrinkles.

"Miss Kurosawa, how are you feeling? There are some things we need to discuss today." she greeted. Ruby looked up from her magazine and with care put it beside her. Her face contorted in strain but she looked to be fighting to place a smile on her lips anyway.

"Wake up, sis." she gently shook her sister's shoulder. "The doctor's here."

Maki waited while Dia woke up and readied herself. The doctor hid her clenched fists in her pockets. She bit her tongue as if punishing it for having to give out the bad news at all. It felt like admitting to some sort of failure: failure on her end to heal Ruby; failure on Dia's end to protect her sister; failure on Ruby's end for succumbing to her illness. She knew she was being illogical, but guilt knew how to sharpen its claws.

"Doctor." Dia cut past all greetings besides a nod of the head. The look in her eye's wasn't unlike Maki's own.

"Ruby, I have some bad news." she sped right to the point. Though she closed her eyes, the young girl kept an uneasy smile on her face. "Your heart - it isn't doing its job, and with what happened yesterday...I believe our only option is to put you on the waiting list for a heart transplant."

Devastation collapsed on the girl all at once like a crumbling building. She bit her lip in a strained effort not to cry, but a waterfall of tears flowed out of her anyway. She curled in on herself, shoulders hunched, arms wrapped around her knees like an animal playing dead. The soft whimpering she made was pitiful. Ruby was comforted into a possessive hug by Dia, who stared hard at Maki. There were tears in Dia's eyes, angry ones.

"We need your consent, and Dia's as well." Maki stared at the wall above the girl. She physically couldn't bring herself to look at Ruby or her sister. Guilt welled inside her like surging flood waters. "And I'll do everything in my power to get you a new heart as quickly as I can."

Dia spoke up first. "Whatever it takes to save my little sister, I'll consent to." Not a trace of doubt lingered in her voice. On the other hand, Ruby was hiccuping. Her crying grew worse, and she tried more than a few times to get the words out though they died on her tongue.

"Am I going to die?" she finally asked. Maki almost choked. She heard Dia take a sharp intake of breath and when she finally ventured a look at Ruby a knife point worked its way between her ribs. Maki thought she might need a new heart herself after this.

"No!" Maki answered, and then regretted the words immediately. She didn't want to lie; the possibility always existed. It always lurked in the shadows. In the end, it was inevitable. But it was her job as a physician to do what she could to relegate that eventuality to its latest natural chance. "There's - of course, there's always a possibility, but I will do _everything_ I can to prevent that. I'll personally choose the surgeon I trust most. I'll fight to get you as high up on that list as possible."

"Oh. O-kay." she choked into a cacophony of sobs. Like a mother Dia rubbed the girl's back and glared daggers at Maki. A part of her felt like it was her responsibility to take whatever blame was tossed her way.

The whole situation had horribly capsized, a shipwreck of a consultation. Maki tried to clear her mind. She used her stethoscope to listen in on Ruby's heart, which beat weakly, sickly, like a drummer with one arm. The bad news was piling up; Maki dreaded even recording these findings in the girl's chart, as if it wasn't true until she wrote it down for the universe to record. As if she was causing it by being the one to observe Ruby's heart in the first place.

So Maki did the opposite. She tried to introduce something good into the universe.

"I-I have some good news." Maki blurted out, surprised by the desperation in her own voice, but not so surprised at the regret already filling her veins. "I'm going to get you a visit by that idol you like."

"You mean - "

"Nico-nii is going to give you a private show." the words stole from her lips like criminals escaping into the heavy silence of the room. Ruby's eyes widened. Dia's narrowed.

"Now listen here -" Dia started.

"A-are you serious?!" Ruby choked out. The tears seemed to finally come to an end for a moment, as shocked as she was by this news.

"Here's a secret - " Maki leaned in close. If she was going to burn everything down to raise this girl's spirits, she figured she might as well go all the way. "She's in the hospital now. She's a patient of mine. I'll get her to throw you a personal show."

"No...no way."

"I'll talk to her today. I promise I can get her to do this."

"Dr. Nishikino, if you're lying, I swear..."

"I'm not." Maki rebutted. The longer she went on with the lie, the easier it was to keep talking. After the night before she wasn't sure if Nico would even speak to her, much less do her a favor. Maki backed out of the room with whatever little grace she could muster, then peeked back in again. "I'll send someone in with the forms later today." she didn't wait for a response from either Kurosawa sister before heading down the hall at an unnatural pace. She was filled with nervous energy, the giddy guilt a child feels when they don't get caught cheating on a test. Her thoughts were filled with Nico, though that had been the case for the better part of the week already. She weighed her options - if worse came to worse, she could always blame her failure on Ohara.

It was only after that nervous energy subsided that she understood where her legs had taken her; her heart had yet to catch up. Maki stood before Nico's door, which was closed tight, tomblike. She prayed that Nico was anywhere besides inside the room as she reached to open the door.

"Looking for me, doctor?" came Nico's dry, disinterested voice from behind her. Maki was glad Nico couldn't see the look on her face, the mixture of unconstrained, contradicting emotions. This week had proven to be an exercise in Maki's self-control, and she was certainly not fit.

"Don't flatter yourself." Maki found herself saying. Once again, half-truths piled on and on. She shook her head to clear out the lies like a dog ridding itself of water. After a deep breath she turned to the woman. "Actually, yes. I need a favor. A big one."

Nico was dressed in a pair of gym shorts that ended high up her thighs, exposing those long, fit legs of hers, and above that, a large white t-shirt. Her hair was tied in a high ponytail. She smelled slightly of sweat in a way that reminded Maki of sex, and she fought hard to ignore the images popping up in her mind. It occurred to the doctor that she had entirely forgotten, for the moment, about Nico's appointments with Umi - that she had forgotten that Nico was a patient and not a permanent fixture in the hospital. Nico's mouth was a thin line, and her eyes a judge's, peering down from the pulpit.

"You're a real piece of work." Nico narrowed her eyes. "I think it's _unethical_ to ask a patient for a favor. Now move. I have to get into my room."

The reversal of her own words stung Maki, and more than anything because they were true. She had been the first to cross those ethical borders, and she had been hypocritical enough to place that responsibility on Nico. But she couldn't let this all drop. Not without trying to do everything she could for Ruby Kurosawa.

"Look, Nico."

"Ms. Yazawa, you mean. You shouldn't get so friendly with your patients, Dr. Nishikino."

Maki bit her tongue, caught between shame and anger. "Damn it, Nico. Can you be serious for once?"

"Seriously move. I have to rest. Doctor's orders."

Nico firmly nudged Maki out of the way and reached for the door handle. There was a low growl that escaped Maki's throat , an injured panther's call, before she yelled "Nico, I need you to be an idol for one more day. I need you to bring someone a smile!"

Nico paused. An eternity passed while Maki waited for the woman's answer. She watched Nico barely contain her emotions behind that angry mask she wore and wondered just how many of the negative ones, and how many of the positive ones, might be directed towards herself.

"I didn't think you'd go that far to hurt me, Nishikino."

"I swear I'm not lying. I wouldn't do something so cruel, no matter what you think of me."

There was another pause, and Maki clenched her fists in impatience. "Well then, what are you waiting for Maki? Come in and tell me all about it."

Maki followed the woman into the room, letting out a sigh of relief. This was legitimately farther than she thought she'd get with Nico after the day before. That there was anything salvageable at all between them was a kind of solace to her overworked nerves and strained heart.

"I have a young patient with a bad heart condition." she began, wringing her hands. "She's a fan of yours. I made a mistake," Maki blushed hard, fighting the urge to leave this part out. "And just blurted out that you were here and that you'd give her a private show. She's suffered a lot recently."

"She had that heart attack you were upset about yesterday?"

Maki bit her lip nervously.

"I'll take that as a yes."

Nico gulped down half of a water bottle in only a few swigs and leaned against her bed, watching Maki with those unreadable ruby eyes. The room was fairly warm but Maki felt like she was sweating beneath her collar for very different reasons. She stood a few feet away from Nico in front of the chair she almost knocked over in her escape the previous night.

"Will you do it, Nico? I figure three songs, maybe half an hour, just after my shift tomorrow? I'll play the music, you can sing and dance." Maki pleaded. "I know I..." the words struggled past her prideful lips. "Have no right to ask, or to be a hypocrite, but I don't feel like I have a choice. I have to do something, and you're the only person I can rely on for this."

The former idol didn't answer at first. Instead she stretched an arm above her head, wincing all the while, and Maki noticed with no uncertain joy how the t-shirt rose up above Nico's fit stomach, and how teasingly snug that band at the top of her red gym shorts was. She didn't even avert her eyes; the low point she felt she'd reached that day with her lies and her desperation and her hypocrisy was also a kind of freedom to continue doing what she thought was wrong.

"I'll have my mother drop off some sheet music for a few of my songs tonight. Learn 'em quick; I have a reputation to uphold."

"You'll - you'll do it? Thank you, Nico. Seriously. I don't even know what to say."

"I'm _only_ doing this for a loyal fan, not some stuck up, hypocritical, beautiful doctor. It's my responsibility as an idol to bring people happiness in their darkest days. Don't get your hopes up."

Maki fought to keep herself professional, to keep the bright smile off of her face. She ventured instead to embody the objectivity that was her goal, though she knew that she'd already failed ten times over that day. "As your doctor, I have order you to make your dance moves more gentle. You have to take better care of your body nowadays."

A cloud lifted from between the two, it seemed, as the last thing Nico joked before Maki walked out of the room was, "There you go again, focusing so much on my body."

Throughout the rest of her shift the doctor tried her best to keep her emotions at bay, as well as any thoughts about Nico. Failure to do either of those had gotten her into more than a few problems over the course of barely a week as it was. Whenever a fleeting feeling pressed against her heart, or a memory filled her mind like a sticky-sweet flood, she fought back with facts, with prognoses and diagnoses and treatments she wielded like weapons against intrusive emotions and beat back to the Alamo she made of her subconscious, at least until she could sort through everything after work. Maki stayed in the present with her patients, rather than lapsing into the past or dreaming of the future - a skill it struck her as pitifully unpracticed, as kept at bay for far too long.

And it worked, mostly. The first patient she saw after leaving Nico's room enthralled Maki. The young man had a large tick hanging off of his back like a garnet scab. The insect was ballooned with blood and entirely immobile, entirely unwilling to leave its feast of a host. Maki had never seen a tick that large.

"Is it bad, doctor?" the young man asked. Maki stood behind the hunched over teen weighing her options. Judging by his red face and meager voice, Maki guessed that the boy was almost as nervous about being in the room with her - a beautiful young doctor - as he was of the grotesque jewel of an insect on his back. Maki wanted to spare the kid at least some of his nervousness by informing him that she was only attracted to women, but her promise to remain professional stayed her tongue.

She hovered over the insect with a sterilized pair of tweezers that glowed in the light like a samurai's sword. "I can get it." she answered. Making sure to grasp what she could of the insect's head, the doctor pulled and removed it, then checked over the wound. There was nothing left, no piece or part of the tick, so she cleaned the spot and bandaged it. "I'll have someone run a small blood test for diseases, but you should be alright." she told the patient. All in all it had gone smoothly. She only thought of Nico once the entire time, which felt like a pitiful thing to celebrate. The thought came when she examined the tick and, perhaps unflatteringly, saw the swell of blood and could think of nothing besides Nico's bright sanguine eyes.

And it was just like that that she knew she had a problem. Never in her life had she been so enamored by one person. Her realm was the hospital, her father the king, and as the princess she developed not only a desire to practice medicine, but high standards in all aspects of life as well. She hardly felt ashamed at this; after all, it took a real-life pop star to do more than pique her interest or attract her for longer than a moment or two. Walking from room to room, from patient to patient, she pinched the bridge of her nose to stave off the headache that was sure to develop before the day was over. It became easier to block out the thoughts and feelings while with patients, but everything returned full force in the hallways between. She stepped into the room of the new mother in 405, who clutched her sleeping baby to her chest. Maki had the results to the tests she had run on the woman's mysterious fainting spells.

"Hello doctor." the woman greeted. Her heavy voice and bag-underlined eyes spoke more than her words.

"Good afternoon," Maki whispered. "We got the results back." she stood beside the bed. The woman looked at Maki with clear, questioning eyes.

"And?"

"You have anemia. And fairly badly, at that. It's miracle that everything went fine during the pregnancy." Maki bowed, "I apologize for not catching it sooner. Had anything gone wrong - "

The young mother smiled and raised a hand to silence the doctor. For a moment Maki was confused. "Don't worry. All's well that ends well, right?" she laughed. "It's only been a few days, but worrying about this little guy makes other worries feel...I don't know, unimportant?"

"I see." Maki cleared her throat. She almost hoped the woman would have blown up at her; an argument might have been a welcome distraction, but then again, who was it that she'd been arguing with the most? Nico. It all kept coming back to Nico like a racetrack that looped endlessly, where the start and the finish lines were one and the same. By the end of that day, as she all but slumped over Nozomi's desk - all pretense of importance and reputation gone for the moment - Maki wanted nothing more than for the week to end. For Nico to leave and forget about her and go back to the land of celebrities and the orbit of her own family. The heartbreak it would cause would at least be less confounding than her current situation. Her head pounded and her back was sore in a way it normally wasn't. Sleep would be a welcome friend that night.

"Dr. Nishikino?" she heard from behind her. A quick glance at Nozomi's interested gaze filled her vision before she turned around to see Nico's mother. She noticed immediately the papers the woman held gingerly in her hand. "Nico told me to bring these to you. I heard what you're doing together - how wonderful!"

"Thank you." Maki tried to keep things neutral. She grabbed the sheets and held them at her side, where Nozomi couldn't see them.

"Good luck tomorrow, alright?" she gave a winning smile and then made her way to Nico's room.

"I wonder just _what_ you could be doing tomorrow. Might this be one of those new experiences the cards predicted?"

"Nozomi, please don't start."

"I'm just looking out for a friend." she said with a knowing smile in her voice. But that grin didn't last long. "Speaking of which, Eli told me about yesterday. Are you alright? I didn't get a chance to talk to you before you left."

Blood crept up Maki's face. "Yeah. Thanks, uh, for worrying." Maki looked at her own reflection in the shiny flooring beneath her feet. She didn't avoid her own eyes this time, when the violet of her irises took on an amethyst hardness, a sharp solidity. "But I'm not the one who had a heart attack. This just means that I have to get more serious."

"Well," Nozomi wrapped Maki into a quick hug around her neck, which the doctor could only describe as wonderfully motherly. The nurse smelled like lavender and love. "That was a new experience too, wasn't it?"

Back in her apartment Maki took her place on the old leather piano bench. The cushion dipped slightly beneath her weight in the familiar fashion of a favorite pair of old shoes. Along the top of the piano Maki laid the three sheets of music she'd spent her half-dinner studying. They weren't difficult, which Maki almost smiled at when she thought of what she'd say to the idol, but in a sense her job was harder. She couldn't rely on a major sound system or professional production equipment to make the relatively simple compositions sound good. All she could do was adapt the music, rearrange it for a fuller effect, and hope that Ruby cared less for musical integrity and more for the chance to meet the idol she adored.

The city in Maki's view breathed bright and lively even at that late hour. While composing and adapting Nico's songs she let her mind, and her eyes, wander between the reflective glow of high rises and their blinking antenna. She gazed over veins and arteries of traffic, across radiating video screens on the faces of buildings and the simple, dot like flames in the small shrines and temples buried between metropolitan buildings and modern citizens. She looked past her own reflection in the clean glass and found herself - or lost herself - in recollection of the past and in fantasies of the future. Her fingers continued on the keys. Every once in a while she marked down a note or a change on whatever sheet she was working on. She thought of Nico. She thought only of Nico. She fell asleep not long after finishing the final song and passed into a dreamless sleep on the bench, leaning uncomfortably over the keys.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!


	7. Saturday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for all of the support so far! 
> 
> A little note: the outfit Nico wears in this chapter is based on the LLSiF card #555, Nico's SR card from the White Day collection. The only change being the lack of "wings" in the back. You can find this at schoolido.lu/cards/555/SR-Yazawa-Nico-White-Day-Smile/. There is also sexual content - though nothing very explicit, really.
> 
> Enjoy~

_"He wrote of the trouble of having his feelings ripen rather than rot."_

A Million Heavens - John Brandon

* * *

It wasn't often that Maki had a shorter schedule than normal. Usually, it turned out that she had to stay far later than intended. But she was thankful for the half shift as it ended on that Saturday afternoon, and even more thankful for the lack of emergencies that might have held her up. Her back ached; sleeping on the piano bench had been a great way to kink her back and she stretched in awkward, strange imitations of bare trees trying to straighten things out. She hadn't seen Nico at all that day, though she'd caught glimpses of her clone-like family members wandering the halls carrying dresses and accessories back and forth. The procession of performance clothing sent a chill up Maki's spine; Nico was sure getting into it.

Late afternoon descended onto the hospital. Maki saw the golden light settle onto the bubbling koi pond from the interior window on the third floor, appearing as if the pond itself was the source of shining beauty. The day was still hazy otherwise - golden cotton candy rather than a gray woolen blanket, but the heat of the sun made it through the cloud cover. Maki basked in that light for a few moments, settling her buzzing nerves. She couldn't remember the last time she played piano for anyone, Nico notwithstanding. After so long, the idea of playing in front of a young patient she barely knew, with a professional idol she was beginning to think she knew too well, was filling her with a nervousness not unlike what she felt all those years ago at her very first recital.

An alarm on her phone shook Maki out of her thoughts. It was time. She made her way to Nico's room and knocked on the heavy wooden door. Behind it, she heard the shuffle of clothing and a zipper's tell-tale whine.

"Come in."

As soon as she entered, Maki's heart skipped a beat or two. Or five. Standing before her in full idol getup Nico was more stunning than the doctor ever imagined the woman could be. The outfit she wore was a complex ensemble of ribbon, lace, beads, and straps that came together in such an enticing way that Maki fought against everything in her body not to ravage the woman then and there. Beginning in a buttoned pale-purple and white top with detached sleeves, the piece spread out at the bottom to accentuate Nico's bare midriff. The top was accented by a lacy flower-like design running beside the golden-buttoned line down the middle and topped off by a large bow with a violet-to-sky-blue gradient that hit every point of color on the outfit; the legs of the bow barely hid the soft swell of Nico's small breasts in a way that called more of Maki's focus than she would admit to. The skirt was a layered wonderland of white, lilac, and pale-violet exposing so much of Nico's creamy smooth thighs that Maki nearly choked. Around her right thigh, below a make-up inked purple heart 'tattoo', a tight garter-like lilac ribbon lead into white straps that wrapped themselves around the woman's bare leg. Nico's hair was tied up in her trademark twintails, each curled at the bottom and tied at the top with a large white accessory that ended in flowers the same gradient as her bow. A golden chain of beads ran from her top to loop against the body of the skirt. For shoes she wore white gladiator sandals; her toenails were painted a matching lilac as that of the garter. Her face was expertly made up; her eyelashes long and black, her cheeks blushed, her lips full and pink and so alluring Maki had to clutch her own coat to keep from reaching out and touching the woman's face. There was no doubt in Maki's mind that Nico was the most attractive woman she'd ever laid eyes on. It wasn't even a contest. Maki felt so blown away that it hurt - it physically hurt to be in the room at that moment. Her heart was fighting its way against her ribcage like a wild animal.

"Maki? Maki, breathe, damn it. Are you an actual idiot?"

The doctor took a breath that filled her screamingly empty lungs and nearly stumbled in place. Her cheeks, her palms, her whole body burned in a way it never had. Her clothes were stifling. Her tongue and her throat,were deserts. She needed to drink the oceans, but she'd settle for drinking in all of Nico instead.

"Anyway, how do I look?" Nico smirked knowingly. There wasn't a doubt that she had read Maki like a book.

"Like a toy doll." She answered despite the telling blush she wore. "But it'll do."

"Hmph. Open your eyes, Maki. You're being _blessed_ right now in the presence of the universe's greatest idol. Show a little respect."

"Don't flatter yourself." It was easier to answer Nico if she looked the girl in the eyes. "You're going to have to cover up to make it through the hospital in secret anyway."

"As if I didn't know that. I have a face mask and eyeglasses in here." She pointed to a bag on her bed. "All I need is your lab coat."

When Nico had finished applying her disguise - to no little joy to Maki that she was wrapped in _her_ coat - Maki sent her ahead to the music therapy room. She wanted Nico to already be there, and she had asked Nozomi to prepare it before hand. It was important that the whole image, the whole effect, hit Ruby all at once. Maki headed to the Kurowsawa's room after Nico's five minute head start was up.

"Ruby, are you ready?"

Like a flower in the pre-dawn glow Ruby Kurosawa was half folded in on herself. She'd dressed up a bit, trading her hospital gown for a cute polka-dot sun dress Dia must've brought from her home, but her eyes were downcast, her fingers fidgeting against one another. "Y-yes." the girl stammered out.

Dia dressed as pristine as usual in jeans and a white button-down blouse. She looked Maki up and down, her nose scrunching a bit at what Maki assumed was probably the slight, nearly inexistent wrinkles in her own maroon v-neck blouse and black pants. Dia lead the way out of the room while pushing her sister in a wheelchair.

"This is still hard to believe." Dia looked straight at Maki. They were the only people in the elevator car. Maki could make out Impressionist reflections of the three in the not-so-mirror-like metal walls. Only the bored hum of the motor and the beeps of the floor indicator made noise. It was a small fit, this specific elevator. Maki almost felt cornered between the lack of space and the lack of mercy in Dia's cold glare.

"Nico really is a patient of mine. She's really here. What would I gain from lying?"

"But why would she agree to this? We don't have to pay, I presume." Dia said. Ruby seemed to be listening intently to the conversation. Maki watched her look between herself and Dia without speaking; the girl's brow was furrowed in worry.

Maki leaned over and whispered into Dia's ear, "Nico-nii is something of a narcissist." when the doctor looked over, she smiled at Ruby's confused look and then said the rest out-loud, "The only payment she's asking for today is Ruby's smile."

When the ding of the elevator signaled their landing on the bottom floor, Maki lead the women around corners and bends until they reached the PT wing. Her own heart fluttered nervously, but she steeled her gaze and tried her hardest not to show it. "The music room is just down this hall. Are you ready?"

Ruby nodded, a weak smile on her lips, so Maki took them the rest of the way. At the door she paused for the final time. "I'm going to be playing the music today."

"You? Really?"

"I have to make sure she doesn't mess up." Maki winked. Another moment later she opened the door. Ruby gasped, eyes wide, mouth agape, and her sister was much the same. There Nico stood in the center of the room with an award-winning smile on her face. She radiated happiness and energy. She was poised waiting to speak the second the door opened with a mic held in both of her hands. Once more Maki was taken aback at Nico's appearance; it was a total boon to have already seen her once before - Maki didn't think she cold have contained her reaction if she hadn't already gotten the barest inkling of control over herself. Maki held the door open for the girls and closed it behind everyone when the room was full.

"Hello!" Nico began, pointing at Ruby, whose mouth still hung open in surprise. "I'm Nico-nii, and I'm here to give a very special fan a very special gift." she smiled wider, if that was possible, and strode up to Ruby. "How would you like a private show?"

"I'd love it! I'd love it, Nico-nii!"

Nico looked to Maki, who had taken her spot behind the keyboard by the wall. It was already stocked with the sheet music she needed. "Ready, Maki?"

But it was just as she placed her fingers on the keys that the the door to the room opened creaking portentously. There, in the doorway, loomed Mari Ohara. The smirk lifting her lips was knowing but unreadable, the brightness of her eyes akin to a cheetah's in the night. Maki's heart shot up her throat; it wanted to fulfill her legs' dream of escape.

"Ms. Ohara." she managed. Out of the corner of her eye she noted Nico's unimpressed frown, and the heartbreaking tension filling the Kurosawa sisters. "This is absolutely not what it looks like."

"Oh?" she asked, stepping into the room about as welcome as a plague. "Then what might it actually be, Dr. Nishikino?"

"Music therapy."

"Here I thought we didn't currently _offer_ such a service. And that you, correct me if I'm wrong, are off the clock."

Maki couldn't respond just as she couldn't hide the childish mixture of disdain and shame coloring her face. This was the worst outcome she could imagine. What would have been her go-to excuse if Nico refused - that Ohara wouldn't let the concert happen - hit her like karma. It was as if she was being punished for having even thought of the lie in the first place.

"Is there a problem, ma'am?" Nico asked in a voice so fake, even Ruby didn't seem convinced. Every eye in the room zoomed to her direction.

"Nico, do you know who that is?" Maki colored her words with a warning tone.

"Does she know who _I_ am?" Nico set her jaw tightly.

"In fact, I do, Ms. Yazawa. Though I don't remember booking any shows in my hospital."

Mari's smirk grew in the same instance that Maki's glare intensified. It was as if all heat in the room was being drained by the tension in the air. That is, until Mari decided to break it with a giggle nearly as mysterious as the rest of her actions had been.

" _In any case,_ it seems like I have a meeting to get to this afternoon. It might just take the rest of the day. But Dr. Nishikino - I'd like to speak to you about our dormant music therapy program in my office on Monday morning."

She didn't even wait for a response before she turned on her heel and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her. Maki breathed out a sigh of relief. It felt like whatever vice was clamping her lungs had been removed, and she could breathe for the first time in forever. She nodded to Nico, and Nico smiled back. The Kurosawa sisters visibly relaxed. She could think about whatever had just happened later on. There was unspoken permission in Mari's words - unspoken hope - that Maki was not going to question. For perhaps the first time, Mari's vagueness didn't frustrate her.

Ruby settled in her wheelchair once more, while her sister stood beside her trying to hide the smile forming on her face. Only one look, one determined nod, was shared between Maki and Nico before they played the first song. Focusing on the 'tale' of a resolved young girl trying her best, this song was incredibly upbeat and energetic. It was one of Nico's first successful singles. Though she was following the her sheet music intently, Maki caught glimpses of Nico's expert, graceful movements with short glances at the woman over the piano. She tried to convince herself to keep her eyes away and adjust her focus elsewhere, to little success. The idol's twirls and light jumps, the subtle movements of her hands and fingers, the innate knowledge of her placement and footing; overall, the strength in the very body Maki shamefully thought was too far gone to do something like this again. That wasn't even mentioning Nico's voice! Maki hated to admit that she enjoyed the high pitch or its forceful insistence, as if beyond every word Nico sang she was really asking for the undivided attention of all who were listening. The doctor still couldn't stand the lyrics, but they were easy enough to block out.

Thanks to the surround sound speakers and better-than average set-up, the makeshift concert had a better sound quality than Maki expected it to. The soundproofing likely helped too. By the end of the first song Maki was already convinced that the plan was a absolute, unadulterated joy on Ruby's face was evidence enough; the girl was leaning out of her seat, almost crying in happiness. Even Dia stopped fighting herself. She beamed while clapping her hands slowly. Somehow, she managed to stay graceful even in excitement.

"Oh my...oh my gosh!" Ruby squeaked out.

"There's more where that came from~" Nico pointed to the patient. "Ready, Ruby?"

"Yes!"

The second song was a single that had given Nico a new wind after her sixth year as an idol. It was the tiniest bit more serious than the first song of the day, though still energetically poppy by nature, and spoke of the singer's impatience with a hesitant lover. Maki gave up all pretense of self-control by that point. She glanced intermittently at the sheet music but her eyes were glued to Nico at every other moment. Glued to the tantalizing swish of Nico's skirt, which threatened to expose more than Maki could dream of. Glued to her long, smooth legs, to the hypnotic tick-top of NIco's hips, to the slight jiggle of her small breasts, to the playful strain in the muscles of her neck. Glued the closest to the exhilaration, the absolute joy and _life_ on Nico's face. But Maki only saw the majority of this when Nico twirled or turned to the side; the piano was, after all, _behind_ Nico, who rightfully faced her audience for most of the show. As nice as her view from behind was Maki liked to see Nico's expressions. The doctor felt refreshed, like a cactus in the rain, every time Nico turned to face her in some fashion. A blush that started at her throat claimed her face; Maki was embarrassed to be fantasizing so openly. If either Kurosawa sister noticed they hid it well. Thankfully it seemed like they couldn't pull their eyes away from Nico either, though likely not for the same reason that Maki struggled to do something that should have been so simple.

"It's time to take a break." Maki stood up after the applause for the second song ended. Nico flashed her a look. "Doctor's orders."

She handed Nico a cold bottle of water, and then headed over to Ruby. She bent low to Ruby's eye level. "How are you feeling? Be honest with me, please."

"I'm fine, Dr. Nishikino. Really. If-if my chest hurts at all, it's because I'm just so...so happy. Thank you."

Ruby's words truly touched Maki. Their directness, their soft force hit a piece of herself she often kept hidden - a place only Nico had managed to pry open otherwise. "You're, uh, you're welcome."

"You're blushing like a schoolgirl, Maki." Nico whispered, halfway done with her water bottle. "It was just some praise."

"Shows what you know." She whispered back angrily. Then, out-loud, "And how are _you_ feeling? Don't lie - are you sore or in pain at all? How are your knees?"

"Perfect! I feel great, really."

"Cut the act, or I'll have to keep you here for another week."

"You just want an excuse to keep seeing me."

" _As if._ Maybe I'll have you transfered over to the pediatric ward."

Ruby's bell-chime laugh cut through the tension in the room and Maki flushed red again, running a hand through her cherry locks in embarrassment. Behind her, Dia's own stifled laugh was another blow to her ego. Nico fumed silently, but Maki figured her comeback might have been cut off by her desire to still look good in front of her fans. Shaking her head to clear away the annoyance, Nico smiled brightly and used the rest of the break time to sign albums Ruby brought with her. They took a few pictures together that Maki was sure Ruby would treasure forever.

The third song started after the CD signing. It was a song Nico often ended her concerts with, one that spoke of her deep appreciation to her fans, and by this third song Maki felt not only a warm compassion in her heart - a hearth-like fire for the woman - but also a different kind of blaze, an all-encompassing inferno in her lower body that grew the more she looked at Nico, until she wasn't sure how she was going to speak without letting tell-tale sparks from that ember illuminate all that she wanted of the woman. At the end of the song, when Nico looked back at her in a moment of radiant happiness, with flushed cheeks and heavy breath, her chest heaving and her body still coursing with electricity, Maki was positive Nico wanted the same.

The next few minutes passed in a colorful blur. The doctor found it hard to keep her mind occupied on anything concrete, on anything more than just the feelings she was struggling to keep under control. Maki only paid half attention as she called Nozomi to help pick up Ruby, and in the meantime she cleaned the room in order to channel her nervous energy into something, _anything_ constructive. Nico spent that time speaking to the Kurosawas instead. Nozomi arrived with a knowing smile waving like a banner across her face and left with little more than a suggestive look, and then they were alone. Maki hadn't left the spot she'd cleaned last, which was by the piano, and Nico stood in the center of the room stretching her tired limbs with practiced care. She was flushed from the effort of singing and dancing, and the warm look in her eyes spoke of inner contentment and satisfaction. Once more Maki looked her up and down to drink in that wonderful outfit covering Nico's wonderful body. The room felt as small as a jail cell, tight and constraining, and almost unbearably warm, but it was a jail cell Maki was glad to be locked in.

"You should feel lucky to have just seen the last show the greatest idol in the universe will ever put on." Nico said. She winced into a final stretch of her arms and then smirked victoriously at the doctor.

"And you should feel lucky that you had this opportunity at all. It really wasn't my best call, if I'm going to be honest. I put your body at risk, and Ruby's heart too."

"You know, If I hadn't met you..." behind the words Maki sensed a profound emotion she couldn't name. She waited for Nico to say more but the girl wasn't even looking at her. She was peering at her own body, following the lines of her arms, studying the way her legs flexed, watching for some physical sign of the damage within.

"Don't, uh, take it personally. I did this for Ruby, not for you."

Nico looked up to her and smirked. Whatever emotion Maki had seen had been covered up for now. "Lying isn't attractive, Maki. You set this whole thing up so that you had an excuse to watch me dance. Don't think I didn't see you _salivating_ when you looked at me."

" _Please_. You're the one who kept turning back to look at _me_! I wasn't your audience, Ruby was, in case you forgot."

"Why are you coming so close to me, then? Can't get enough?"

"Maybe if I get close I can show you just how wrong you are!"

Chest to chest, face to face, it only took a few seconds of intense staring before Maki grabbed NIco's hips, pulled her as close as she could be, and smashed their lips together. The kiss was a battle, a war, and neither woman backed down in the fight to push lip against lip, to lay siege with a tongue, to claim all of the available territory they could reach with mouth and hand. Nico wrapped an arm around Maki's back and one behind her neck while Maki's hands roamed to Nico's wais. Nico pushed Maki into the door. She blocked any escape her with her arms on either side of the doctor's head, and Maki couldn't help but remember doing largely the same two days before. Nico stared right into Maki's eyes, testing her, and with the impatience of an addict Maki pushed the girl away and locked the door behind her. The sound of the lock was like a gunshot at a race. She grabbed at Nico again, holding the woman's face in her hands.

"Maki - "

"Don't speak." she said in between kisses. "I don't want to think about what I'm doing."

Nico grinned, nodded, and with the narrowing of her eyes like a falcon diving towards prey, all but pounced on top of the doctor. The room became a mess of clothes in an instant. Maki gave a passing prayer for the sacrifice of that beautiful outfit Nico had worn, now strewn around a music stand carelessly.

If pressed, Maki would admit that the sex she had on the floor of the music therapy room was less of a movie in her mind and more of a photo album of flashes, of snapshots and focuses that never faded. The doctor couldn't remember a distinct passage of time; there was only the way the intense sunlight softened from the bright beginning to the dusky end. She didn't recall all of Nico's body in one panorama, but clear frames were burned into her celluloid memory: the unblemished skin, delicate and smooth; the toned muscles of her arms and legs and stomach that lent a gentle power to all of her actions; the sharp rise and fall of her chest and the sweet shuddering of her breath; the strength of Nico's fingers gripping at her back, pulling at her hips, roaming and caressing and invading; the pink - all the fresh pink of Nico's magnificent body, like her lips and the tips of her breasts and her womanhood. This roll of film never dulled or warped. The negatives were kept far from the light, kept safe and ready for the darkroom of her memory, waiting to be developed at any time.

Accompanying this photo album was a complimentary soundtrack recorded in life-like fidelity. It was filled with that same shuddering breath in her ear, with the military beat of Nico's heart, with the cries and moans and sighs and sharp intakes of breath that made Maki glad the room was soundproofed. She had, besides the album, a recollection of the other sensations of that unending moment. A muddled multi-media mix of touch and taste and smell - of impressions, of desires, of tension and release. She recalled with a kind of sincere youthful embarrassment how lovely the comfort of the afterglow and its sweet embrace on the coarse carpet made her feel - in some way, it was better than the sex itself. This set - the photos, the soundtrack, the miscellaneous media - was lossless data Maki would never let go.

What finally forced them out of their shared fantasy was the unacceptable itchiness of the cheap carpet beneath their naked bodies. It called them back to the real world from a realm of pleasure that couldn't have lasted forever. Neither woman had put the lights on when the day was turning towards night, and so each was obscured in dusky light and slate-purple shadow. They dressed in silence with the intrusive shame of the tryst. Shame was too strong of a word for the doctor, but the fact that they went _almost_ all the way - that they achieved the physical end to what had built up during the week, but avoided anything emotional entirely - felt treacherous. Maki didn't know what to say. Words - apologies, thank you's, requests - died in her throat before they had the chance to be born. Nico's expression was unreadable as she dressed, and then picked up the items of her disguise. Anxiety swirled nauseatingly in Maki's stomach.

"I'll see you tomorrow, right? Before I check out?" Nico finally broke the silence. She turned to look at Maki expectantly, though her hand was on the doorknob behind her. They were going to leave the room separately with a few minutes in between, as a just-in-case insurance policy against being found out.

"I have off tomorrow, so..." Maki twirled a string of hair between a finger. A cold hand was plucking at her nerves, making discordant notes of fear. It was as if all that she had been unsure of was preventing her from doing what she knew she should. Her worry over her job, and of an Ethics board, returned full force, and that nagging itch that Nico might simply forget about her when she returned to the world of fame and fortune gripped Maki in her post-sex vulnerability. It felt weak to even entertain these thoughts, but somehow this weakness only worsened as Maki took notice of it. She felt as if she were treading shallow water at the edge of a great dark basin, whose gaping mouth threatened to consume her. To move forward meant drowning in uncertainty.

" _I'll see you tomorrow, right?_ " it was as if Nico's vermilion eyes were glowing in the dusk haze in the room. Maki turned her face away in shame.

"I - Nico, I - "

She watched Nico's hand form into a fist, but the idol walked out without another word. Maki felt her shame double. Triple even. She didn't know _why_ she didn't know the answer to Nico's question. Her feelings were a bad Jackson Pollock impression, thrown onto the canvas of her heart without thought or pattern. The room was constraining with a crushing silence that followed Nico's absence. It became a jail cell once more, a maddening solitary confinement. She couldn't stand it, not the dark or the shame or the silence, so Maki left before the 5 minute buffer they agreed to had passed.

As she slipped out of the door, disheveled and lost in a daze, a single sharp word cut through the otherwise empty hallway. Prohibitive in its mixture of admonition and investigation, the voice compelled the doctor to freeze in place.

"Maki?!"

There, coming around the corner from the nearby PT wing, was Umi. She stopped in her tracks with an accusatory dagger of a stare. "I just saw Nico coming out of that very room. She looked just as disheveled as you do..." Umi gasped at her own realization, "You two were doing something shameful, weren't you?!"

More than despair, more than anger or fear, Maki felt a kind of resignation settle into her bones. It was like she'd been waiting for this - waiting for the shoe to drop, waiting to get caught, waiting for her earlier fears to come to pass, as if it'd justify the pain of what she had put Nico through with her uncertainty. "I - "

"You wait right where you are. _Don't move_. I'm going to sign out now that my shift is over and we _will_ discuss this."

Maki could have left after the sound of Umi's footsteps clicking down the hall disappeared, but a part of her _wanted_ to be admonished, to be treated like a child because she had just about the same ability to sort through her own feelings as one. Umi's glare was a steel sword when she returned, walking with the same determination and confidence she did everything with. She tossed her head in the direction of the exit and Maki followed wordlessly.

Not far from the hospital was a local bar often filled with overworked doctors and nurses coming off of long shifts and in need of liquid relaxation. Although opened not many years before, it was designed in a traditional Japanese fashion. There were low tables spanning parts of the room seating friends and strangers alike, stained with the circular liquid shadows of the bottom of beer glasses, often slightly sticky from spilled spirits. Secluded booths were blocked out with cloth doors adorned with cheerful _kanji_ that offered privacy to those who needed it. The bar was almost always packed and was known not only for its drinks but for the tasty, salty, cheap bar food it served the overworked and underfed medical staff. On any given night finding an open text book or stack of case studies in front of a drunk med student was an easy task. Thankfully it was never too loud; the normal hum of human voices never rose above excited chatter, and it didn't cause any distractions between Maki and Umi, who sat face to face in one of those private booths. Maki was a beer and half deep before she answered Umi's question. Umi had had only a shot of chilled sake and sat with her back straight in the seat. Her eyes never left Maki's, but mercifully reserved their judgment.

"What am I doing?" Maki asked back, "If you want an answer, Umi, I honestly can't give you one. I don't even know myself."

"You know very well just how serious ethics boards take doctor/patient affairs, I'm sure."

"Of course I know." she shot back. "I tried telling her that but - I really can't blame her for this. I'm just as guilty. Actually, in the eyes of an ethics board, I'd be the only guilty party."

"Then why do something so..."

"Dangerous? Shameless?"

"Yes."

"I - Umi, I _honestly_ don't know. She burns me up. I can't stand her sometimes. She's got this _attitude_ with me and I have no idea what comes over me because the angrier I get, the more I just want to - " her cheeks grew red uncontrollably. "It's ridiculous."

"It must not help that she's an idol."

"So you've noticed her body too?" Maki slipped, before cursing under her breath and blaming the alcohol. She wasn't a lightweight, not usually, but the feelings she'd been bottling found their high-speed liquid exit in each sip she took.

"No! No, I mean, she won't tell anyone. At least, she has a reputation to uphold too. If you were ever to slip - which I am _not_ condoning - and have a relationship with a patient, I suppose you could have chosen worse."

"She _was_ an idol _."_ Maki grumbled.

"I'm sorry?"

"Nico was dropped by her agency after she got hurt, so she's not an idol anymore. It was one of those things we kind of...bonded over. She doesn't know where to go from here, and I think it made her vulnerable. I wanted to help, but I'm useless at things like this. I think I just made everything worse."

The second shot of sake Umi ordered came, and the girl downed it one one gulp. There was something of a far away look in eyes, and in unconscious and uncharacteristic show of weakness she began to wring her hands. Maki looked away for a moment; it was pitiably strange to see a paragon of inner-strength show cracks in her facade. "I believe I can understand where she's coming from."

"Hmm?" Maki looked back at the woman and cocked an eyebrow.

"When I finally had to stop competing in professional meets, after my last Olympic showing, I only did so because I damaged my elbow past a point where I could compete again. I felt lost afterwards." Umi admitted with a shake of her head. She crossed her arms. "There was a terrible span of time where I just didn't have any idea what to do in life. It was like my reason for living was gone. It wasn't until I was inspired by my own physical therapist that I found a new calling."

"I had no idea."

"I don't often recount such an upsetting time in my life."

"I tried to comfort Nico about this, but I guess I don't know how it feels. I always knew I'd be a doctor. And while I'm not where I want to be," Maki admitted, with some self-directed anger, "If this was ever taken away from me, I'd...I don't know what I'd do. I can't imagine not being able to be a physician."

A silence fell between the two filled with the lively sounds of the bar on a Saturday night. Maki ordered another drink, but Umi declined. Though they didn't go out often, Maki had never seen the other women have more than two drinks. She chalked it up to Umi's built-in discipline. The haze surrounding Maki after her tryst with Nico was gone after three drinks, pushed aside for the more general drunken distraction of beer. Her head was swimming just enough to give her blissfully little to focus on, but she still felt unsettled. Eventually, Maki spoke. She moved her newest bottle between her hands distractedly.

"I wonder if she'd be as...into me as she seems to be if she wasn't stuck in the hospital, or if she knew what to do now that her career is over."

"Second guessing things is for the weak of heart." Umi said matter-of-factly. "You can help her with this next step in her life, if you so choose, and if she lets you. You''d want that if you had to quit being a doctor, no?"

Maki didn't answer. Those earlier fears returned in force until she felt like she was back in the music room, pulling her naked body up from the itchy carpet and trying to avoid Nico's eyes. She felt the desire to order another drink, but she knew better than to try to drown her sorrows.

"As we both know, she's being released tomorrow." Umi began. "Are you going to see her? After all, she won't be your patient any longer. Even I can't find fault in that."

"I don't know." Maki groaned. She slid forward in her seat. Her head made a dull thud as it landed on the table.

"In archery, you shoot before you get caught up in all of the questions about distance and accuracy and speed. You center yourself, and in doing so you center the arrow. That's how I always did it, and I was successful in my endeavors."

Maki looked up at her, still silent.

"Take that to heart. Center yourself, and shoot for the target you want to hit. If you've done it correctly, you won't ever miss your shot."

Umi left money on the table and walked out of the booth with a simple goodbye. The doctor watch the cloth flaps sway in the wake of her departure. She was left in the booth in a bubble of inner silence, surrounded by the sounds of clinking glass, of laughter and tears, and floating with the overall feeling of drunken weightlessness. She paid and called a cab, and set off for her empty apartment. A part of her hoped to fill it with the worries that crowded her mind, and more pressingly, with the deafening feelings of her heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!


	8. Sunday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These pre-story notes will never be able to truly express how much it means to me that people have read and enjoyed this, and felt enough about it to review. Really, I appreciate it more than you can know.
> 
> As I mentioned previously, there is one more chapter left. I'll try hard to get it out before the end of next week, but it may have to wait until I get back from vacation. I want to make sure it fits exactly how I want to end the story.
> 
> Enjoy~

_"When there are so many true things that can be said in life, I don't know why I say the things that aren't."_

Dear Thief: A novel - Samantha Harvey

* * *

She woke up late, and she knew it before even glancing at the time on her phone. Large and nearly noon-positioned, shining for the first time that week without the haze of low clouds of foggy air, the sun sent an uncomfortable warmth into her otherwise tepid headache. Her apartment was too high up to hear the morning chorus of city birds, or the dry rush of wind through the leaves of the trees, but Maki observed these things silently looking over the back of her recliner-turned-bed and through the large glass wall behind it with the removed attitude of a scientist. The quiet in her home felt like a pressure on her weakly pounding brain. Her joints creaked with aches and her muscles strained and kinked like knotted rope. A crawling centipede of anxiety and dread wrapped around her lungs. Maki knew she had to go see Nico but her legs were betraying her. They wouldn't move.

Closing her eyes, she ran a hand through her hair and thought of Nico all the while. If she didn't go to see the former idol, she knew she'd just be committing the same crimes of abandonment that she feared Nico would. If she didn't go right then, then their sleeping together was a mistake and not an opportunity. An error of judgment, not a consensual crime. She took her first tentative steps up, dressing without paying attention, then brushing her teeth and doing her hair into semi-neatness, but while her heart beat faster her blood felt congealed in her veins, as slow as ice flows in a frozen sea. The fist Nico had made the night before seemed to close around Maki's heart. She wanted to force that fist into a hand. She wanted to hold that hand in her own tightly.

She raced down the crowded streets of Tokyo at a leg-burning, chest-heaving speed that never seemed fast enough. Her apartment was only a couple of blocks from the hospital, and now she was barreling down the same route she walked every day, her hair blowing behind her, her heart in her throat, looking for all the world like a madwoman. She _was_ mad; she felt crazy and angry, incensed at herself for too many reasons to name and at Nico for two: for making her feel this way, and for being impossible to let go.

Maki bumped shoulders with strangers, bashed her arms against luggage and suitcases and shopping bags, but felt none of it. It all might as well have been air. When the hospital rose into sight she only pushed herself faster. Her kinked muscles and aching joints burned with the effort - burned clear of those creaks and pains she woke up with into pure white-fire vivacity. The doctor pushed her way into the same marble entrance she walked through everyday, not stopping to say hello to the convenience store man; if she stopped at all, she would collapse. Her lungs were balloons near bursting, but if she kept running she hoped they'd stay inflated. Unlike on most days where it was her kingdom, the bustling crowded hospital was more a hostile country of enemies. Every body she had to avoid stacked seconds onto a clock already far too out of time. Every face that didn't belong to Nico was an unwelcome distraction to her mission. She avoided the slow elevators and chose the stairs; it was a miracle she made it to the fourth floor without collapsing, but there was no way she could continue without at least a minute's rest. She leaned her back against the nurses' station when she felt the concerned eyes of nurses, doctors, and patients fall on her. At this point, embarrassment was as fat from her mind as the stars.

"Maki? What brings you here on your day off?" Nozomi said, clearly already knowing the answer. Maki didn't turn to look at her. She fought against her body's insistence for oxygen and tried to control her breathing ands steady her heartbeat. Her legs felt weak like paper, crumpled paper. Sweat pooled behind her knees and on her forehead and down her sides, but all of this had to be worth it. She had to make it worth it. Everything she'd been put through would be for nothing otherwise.

"I tried to stall them." Nozomi whispered from behind.

"And?"

"You're cutting it real close."

Maki turned her face up to the woman. There was a searching looking in her eyes, but more than anything a motherly concern. Nozomi shoo'd the other nurses away with a flick of her wrist, like an empress to her servants, and fixed Maki's bangs. The doctor blushed like a schoolgirl; she wasn't sure if even her mother had ever done that.`

"At least _try_ to look presentable, Maki."

"I ran from home." she said between gasps with the little bit of breath left, and against every complaint of her sore body. Struggling, Maki forced herself away from the wall she leaned on. She didn't say goodbye to Nozomi as she rushed off and only waved in acknowledgement at the nurse's fading yell "Bring a special guest to dinner next time Eli and I invite you!"

Maki hurried down the left hallway up until the end. The nameplate with Nico's name was already gone, but a flash of black hair in her eyesight shocked her heart into skipping a beat. She all but skidded into the room, and had to grab onto the side of the doorway to keep herself from falling.

"Nico!"

When Ms. Yazawa turned around she had the same amused expression on as the first time the confusion happened. The older woman had Nico's belongings in hand, and was straitening up the place after the idol's extended stay.

"No, it's still just me." She laughed lightly. "Nico took little Cotaro down to see the fish before she left."

The doctor didn't wait to hear any more. She rushed back the way she came, ignoring the screaming protests of her body, bounding down the steps two at a time until reaching the main floor and working through crowds to reach the door to the garden. There was a tremor in her legs and a crushing pressure in her chest that all but yelled for her to collapse there, only steps away from her goal. Underneath the pain and the panic she knew that she was facing her last chance to end this whole ordeal with Nico. The automatic double doors were her last barrier. She could stop there. She could turn right around and head back to her apartment, with Nico none the wiser and neither of them any happier. Her stomach was full of the same cold, sticky swamp water of anxiety that often filled her before telling a patient bad news. She fought through it. She had to face her fears head on.

The day was humid and hot, more June than May, something Maki failed to notice on her manic run to the hospital. Though a breeze blew through the ferns and flowers of the garden it was a heavy one, a hot wind that only added to the oppression of the weather. Sunlight glinted off of the glassy minerals in-laid in the cobblestones lining the path, irregularly catching Maki's eyes with each of their passes over the garden. Bubbling giggles floated over from the far side of the koi pond. That was where Maki finally found them - finally found Nico squatting beside Cotaro in front of the fish. They took turns tossing stale bread into the water. Every time one of those calico koi poked their heads up to devour a crumb Cotaro clapped with innocent delight.

Maki stepped slowly over to the two. She didn't speak. She waited for Nico to notice her, but she wasn't impatient. Now that she had entered the garden the meeting had no chance but to happen. Nico finally looked up when Maki's shadow fell onto her; her red eyes spoke a dead language, unintelligible, and the quirk of her lip could equally have been relief or annoyance. She whispered something to her brother before wiping unseen dust from her thighs and standing up. Then she motioned with a nod of her head for Maki to follow her to a shady spot beneath one of the garden's oaks, far from Cotaro. Not another soul was out there. It may as well have been a planet of its own.

"I really didn't think you were going to come after you failed to show up this morning, but I guess you just couldn't miss out on seeing the greatest idol in the universe one more time."

"Don't make me regret coming, Nico."

They stared one another unblinkingly; it was no longer so certain who was predator and who was prey. Maki took note of the outfit Nico was wearing - the denim shorts exposing her legs, the cute blue and white striped blouse on top, and the white purse slung across her body. Her hair was done up in the same twintails _Nico-Nii_ wore. For a quick moment Maki was embarrassed at the gym clothes she'd thrown on just to get out of the apartment.

"I _hate_ to admit it," Nico started, pouting doubly to hide the blush erupting up her face, "But it was...nice of you to set up that concert. Not just for Ruby, but for my own sake. It reminded me about how much I love all of my fans, and how much I love putting smiles on people's faces."

"What are you going to do now anyway? I mean, now that you're completely done being an idol. You know, if you need help, I'm...uh." she steeled her voice. "I can be there for you."

"Don't you worry, I have something up my sleeve. I'm never going to quit doing what I've always done - bringing smiles to as many people as I can with my music. It's the thing -" she coughed, now bright red, "the _second_ thing I love the most in this world."

Maki ignored the implication, but her burning cheeks didn't. "I should have figured you were that vain."

"Is it any different from what you're doing as a doctor? Healing totally brings people smiles. And I'm _sure_ you love doing that."

Maki crossed her arms and looked away from Nico. She couldn't deny it, not in good conscious. Instead she tilted her head slightly to listen to the carefree birds chirping above her, singing only for their own delight. She watched a butterfly float past Nico in the lazy elegance all butterflies know.

"Didn't think so." Nico smirked. "But it would be nice of you to admit it."

"All I'll admit to is _nausea_ at the thought of being like you." she spat. Her tongue dripped venom as a last-ditch effort of protection, to save her heart from all the vulnerability love entailed. Nico only smirked in response; Maki admired that expression with an adoration so deep she wanted to admonish herself for feeling it.

"But why? You love me, Maki. Admit that, at least."

She couldn't control the cherry blood coloring her cheeks any more than the weather, so she stomped away to hold her head in her angry hands on the wooden bench in front of the koi pond. She heard, more than felt, Nico following her. The silence of the empty courtyard made those footsteps louder than ever.

"You know, it's actually kind of shitty of you to respond like that."

"Give me a minute. I'm trying to clear my head of you."

"Again, rude." Nico put her hand on her hip. She stood in front of Maki and cast a sky-scraper shadow.

Maki fought her tongue for the sentence she didn't want to let it say, a sentence made of anti-freeze sweet syllables - three in all, one for each word. She wanted her reservations and doubts to put up some sort of fight before she sabotaged them, as she knew she would. As she felt she always knew she would since she met the other woman. Nico pressed on, only growing bolder on the shore of Maki's silence. Her insistence, her attitude were waves eroding whatever was left of Maki's hold on the land. Maki thought she was going to lose herself in those tides, instead of heading for higher land. Worse, she wanted to drown in them.

Nico seemed to be able to chart all of Maki's fears and insecurities. After sitting beside her she said, with a surprisingly gentle voice, "As of fifteen minutes ago, you're no longer my physician and I'm no longer your patient, _Dr._ Nishikino."

"I know. I _know_ , Nico, but - " she let out something like a moan of annoyance. Annoyance at herself, and at the woman, and at the world. "You said that Nico-nii loved all of her fans. How can I be sure that...that..." Maki laid out the last of her defense, a crumbling wall, a hole-pecked cloth. Something warred inside her, asking why she even came, came _knowing_ what was going happen this day, if she was just going to fight it. She tried her best to silence whatever it was.

Nico leaned in close, until her hot breath ghosting over Maki's skin made the doctor shudder in sinking delight.

"You're right, Maki. Nico- _nii_ loves everybody. But Nico _Yazawa_ only loves one person. _"_

And there it was; with such a simple turn of phrase Maki lost. That wall crumbled to dust, the cloth fell to tatters, the seashore was claimed and submerged in the impossibly murky depths of love. Maki didn't look up, still holding her head in one hand, but with the other she gripped Nico's knee and clutched it tightly in surprising neediness. She didn't say anything else. All of this was uncharted territory. She'd never let herself fall for anyone this way, not even in those inexperienced, wide-eyed relationships of her youth. Her heart was unclaimed land even then. An air pulsed off of Nico in the colors of victory for finding Maki's white flag of surrender stained red, unused and soiled - evidence that neither woman had backed down, and that Nico won fair and square. The koi pond still bubbled in the background, accented with Cotaro's laughter.

In the silence that followed, as heavy as the humidity around them, Maki searched for something - anything - to say. Seeing Nico with that smug look on her face sent competing waves of anger and desire coursing through her bloodstream, but regardless of this, she needed something to happen before her heart exploded out of her chest - before those fears and doubts and her wounded pride returned. She squeezed Nico's knee again and Nico turned to her. Something, some invisible, intangible sensation passed between them like body warmth; a message, coded in light and air. With movements more measured and soft than Maki had ever expected to belong to Nico, the woman raised Maki's chin, bent her own head low, and placed the sweetest of kisses on the doctor's lips. Maki breathed out a shuttering breath. Her head fell back into her hands.

"Give me your phone." Nico held out her hand expectantly when she pulled away. Maki scowled; the mood had been ruined in an instant.

"What? Why?"

"Just give it, Maki."

Out of the corner of her eye Maki glared, but she still reached into the pocket of her gym shorts, unlocked the phone, and pressed the slim device into Nico's hand a bit too hard. The woman typed with a practiced speed and efficiency. A few moments later it was back in Maki's pocket, courtesy of Nico's lithe fingers. The doctor didn't let the way those fingers rubbed her thigh go unnoticed, not that her body would let her.

"Now you have my number." Nico bounded up from the seat and stood imposingly over Maki, posing with all the confidence of the Colossus of Rhodes. "And I expect a call when I get home, hmm, twenty minutes from now? No later, anyway. We're going on a date tonight. Or rather, you're going to _take_ me on a date tonight."

"You're not going to go easy on me, are you?" Maki all but pleaded.

"I wouldn't be me otherwise."

"I knew it. This was a terrible idea."

"You'll learn to love it. You already love me."

After a surprisingly tender stroke of the hair on Maki's still bent head, Nico walked away and lead her excited brother out of the garden and into the hospital. Maki didn't move for long minutes. Whatever was going on inside her now was entirely its own animal. It was a whole new species; unknown, strange, possibly dangerous, but still _recognizable_ as a living creature like her. As something that'd always shared her world, though it was hidden in dense forests and dark caves for years. Hidden in uncharted wilderness Maki had been dropped into unceremoniously and against her will. But what beautiful wilderness it turned out to be.

Without the ticking of time against her, Maki's trip back home had a whimsically slow pace she couldn't find it in herself to be mad at. She meandered her way back to the hospital's marble entrance and waved goodbye to the man at the convenience store, who stared at her with eyebrows cocked. It was just as muggy and hot outside as it had been the whole day, but without the shade of the trees in the garden the sunbaked concrete and reflective skyscraper glass heated the air like an oven. She passed the same colorfully-awned shops and beautiful window goods as she did every day. She walked through the same wafting food smells as always. But all of it had taken on a twist, a fish-eye lens effect, and Maki didn't know if the new perspective was what her whole world might look like soon enough if she didn't settle the beat of her heart and the blood in her veins. 10 minutes passed. She had 10 to go.

In the elevator going up to her apartment she was thankfully alone. Her thoughts were less coherent words and were more flashing images: Nico's smile; Nico's body; Nico's words like text etched into stone; Nico's touch. Nico Nico Nico. It was an intoxicating kind of madness, to let herself go like this. To stop fighting it. That these feelings had formed only over the course of a week felt perversely incorrect. She felt like they'd been buried for years, starved of light and water and air, and were flowing now so quickly to make up for lost seasons, for so many lost seasons.

She made it to her apartment and closed the door with a click. An electric anticipation in the air told her that it wouldn't ever be so quiet and lonesome in the place again. Whatever was left of the forces of Maki's doubts and fears, those wounded soldiers, took up positions in the unused, too-clean corners of her home, in the too-well made bed and the cold stove and the unblinking reflection in the large glass walls overlooking the city. 9 minutes passed since the last time she checked.

Maki stared this last enemy down, her reflection in the window, as she sat on the piano bench. She pulled her phone out, never looking away from her reflection for more than a few moments, and found Nico's number in her small contacts list. Her finger hovered over the call button.

Maki allowed a growing sunrise of a smile to grace her features. She pressed on 'call', and hardly a ring trilled its whole song before Nico picked up the phone.

"Took you long enough." she heard the smile in the woman's voice.

"Please, Nico - I was right on time."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!


	9. After Story pt. 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I'm sorry for how late this is. Between real life responsibilities (essentially going full time at my first job, getting a second job, and beginning my second-to-last semester at college) and a creative decision that turned my plan of a sub-1000 word epilogue into a 16,000-plus word after story, what was supposed to be posted months ago has been extremely delayed. This story has been something I've technically been writing since March, and completing it means a lot to me. It's finally done bar a final run through of editing and revision.
> 
> With that said, I decided to split the after story into two chapters. This is the first, and the second will (very hopefully) be up by the end of the week, or by this time next week. I hope the wait was worth it.
> 
> Enjoy~

_"This is what long journeys are for. To see what's back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself...that you'll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations."_

Zero K - Don Delillo

* * *

"I bet you're glad that today's the last day before your romantic vacation begins." Nozomi turned her face towards Maki as she stood in front of the doctor in the line for coffee. Her violet hair hung low down her back in its trademark twintails, and she rocked casually back and forth on her heels.

"You don't know the half of it." the doctor pinched the bridge of her nose, ignoring the way her cheeks blushed at ' _romantic_ ' and hoping that Nozomi would do the same. "I don't know if it was the out-of-season flu outbreak this spring, or all of those patients from that awful bus crash or what, but I feel like I haven't gone home in forever. This long break is going to feel like paradise."

The coffee line inched forward in painful intervals that morning, as if sluggishness or fatigue were just more infections spread throughout the hospital. High-ceilings, large glass windows, and a veritable greenhouse of verdant plant life lent the cafeteria a fresh atmosphere like that of a bird enclosure, even if the rainy-season weather, all humidity and stifling heat, did nothing to lift spirits. There were clusters of circular tables with four or five seats each filling the room; most were empty in that lull between breakfast and lunch, but a smattering of doctors and patients and families sat around in an order about as deliberate as chicken pox.

Nozomi laid a soft hand on Maki's lab-coated shoulder. "Just think - you only have a few hours left before you and Nico hop on a plane for Okinawa!" she beamed. "If you want, I can try to discern the probable happiness of your journey with some readings."

"Like I told you that first time - I only wanted to do a reading once, and I never want one again. And anyway," Maki scoffed to hide a smirk. "Nico might as well already be on vacation. That idiot's luggage has been packed for a week now. It's kind of an eyesore." She turned her nose up. "You know I like a neat and tidy apartment."

"It's been over a year, Maki." Nozomi laughed. "You can ease up on her a bit, don't you think?"

Maki rolled her eyes. After buying their drinks, Nozomi's iced coffee sweating as if it too suffered from the humidity in the room, Maki and the nurse strolled towards one of the empty tables and sat. Their chairs scraped beneath them loudly over the din of the cafeteria. "Ease up on her? Nico added some mystery stop for the day before we go to Okinawa and she won't tell me where we're going. She can be so annoying sometimes."

Nozomi covered her mouth with a hand, but couldn't stop the way her shoulders shook with laughter. There was a mischievous glint in her eyes that made Maki cringe.

"You already knew about it, didn't you? God, even Kotori knows and I don't." the doctor's shoulders slumped and she slid down her seat in exasperation.

"She told Eli, too." Nozomi said between giggles.

Maki nearly crushed the steaming cup of coffee in her hand.

* * *

There wasn't a hallway in the hospital that Maki didn't know by heart, by the sound of her shoes echoing against the walls and squeaking on the shiny, waxed floor. The hallway to the music therapy room might have been the most well known of all. She turned the final corner to the end of the hallway and as she approached the door opened leisurely, a cat's yawn. A girl around 14 slipped out with a small smile on her face, clothed in a shapeless hospital gown. Her wrists were supported in braces, and one of her legs was straightened in a cast like a young tree limb. Behind her, grinning, followed Nico, who rubbed the girl's chestnut hair playfully.

"You did great today, Kyouko! I won't see you next week, but I want you to practice what we went over today with the therapist who takes my place, alright? Work towards shining as bright as you can!"

"Thank you, Ms. Yazawa! I'll practice just for you!" the girl bowed, before running to her waiting mother standing patiently at the end of the hallway.

"She's a good kid, that one. Real shame about that whole falling-out-of-the-window thing she managed to do at her school." Nico leaned her thin body on the doorjamb. "I have a feeling that you were never that sweet to your music teachers."

"And you're basing this theory on what, exactly?"

Nico shrugged. "Just a feeling. Then again, I know personally that you have a cute side too, so who knows?"

"Shut it. Let's just get back to my apartment. I still need to finish packing."

The doctor had already begun walking up the hallway when a phone went off. Nico had barely taken a step before she was interrupted by a loud, festive ringtone. The former idol glanced at the number on the screen, then held up a finger to Maki and walked down the hall for privacy. Maki watched her with narrowed eyes. She could make out very little of the conversation; just a mix of radio static interspersed with a note, a tone, of Nico's high register and the river rush of her words, colored with the interpretive dance of body language. Nico wore an expression of something like concern, or suspicion. A minute passed, if that, before Nico hung up and returned. Maki didn't hide her frown.

"Who was that?"

"Wasn't important." Nico intertwined their fingers. "Now, you were saying you needed my _expert_ fashion advice to help you pack?"

This daily routine - picking Nico up from her job, going home together, being together - began some months before. Maki remembered it all fondly, even when she was being annoyed by the woman with whom she now shared her life. She hated to admit it, but quite a bit of her new lifestyle was thanks to Mari Ohara. And as with so many other changes in her life, it all started with the week after Nico became her patient:

_With a pounding headache like a pile driver to her temples and a stomachache like a churning sea, Maki all but fell into Mari's office the Monday after she and Nico got together. She sat as straight and stable as she could in the chair in front of Mari's desk with the hopes of not releasing all of last night's dinner on the glass-and-chrome tabletop. The blood in her head pounded behind her eyes and in her temples, and if she focused on anything but the oddly-English 'M' shaped piece of coral decorating the desk, she might have collapsed then and there. She envied Nico, who was laying in her, Maki's, bed, sleeping off the embarrassingly large amount of wine they'd shared on their first date. And the delicious food they'd eaten at a high-class restaurant. And the hours - the uncountable, unbelievable hours of love making afterwards, the effects of which were only making Maki that much weaker - that much more exhausted - there in the crisp leather seat in front of her grinning boss. This was the very first time that Maki ever went into work with a hangover and she decided then and there that it would be her last._

_"So, as we were discussing the other day, I think it's high time this hospital reviewed its lack of a proper music therapy program, don't you?" Mari's hands were folded underneath her chin, underlining her smile. Through half-lidded eyes the hospital director hid her thoughts like a coy aristocrat. Maki had a feeling that the woman probably guessed just how she was feeling that morning, and probably guessed why, too._

_"Uh, yes. Yes, we need to bring the music therapy program back. We have the equipment in working order, the room is still free, and there is clear research out there supporting its benefits."_

_"But do we have the staff for it?" Mari asked. "Would you be willing to spend even more of your - " her smile stretched across her face, snake-like. "now even more thinly-spread time here?"_

_"Ma-_ Director Ohara _, I will do what's best for my patients. Let's leave my personal life out of this. Of course, I couldn't be the only person in the position in the first place; we need to hire at least a few others. But it's not a big field yet."_

_"Did you have any ideas, then? I'm going to look to you to head this thing."_

_"We hire musicians first." she pounded a hand into her palm like a gavel, "We hire professional music teachers and pay for them to get some fast-track recreational therapy certs. Once the kinks are all ironed out we can bolster the staff and set up more training."_

_"Fast and dirty, eh?" Mari laughed. She ran a hand through her golden hair. "Is that how you like things, Maki?"_

_"_ If that's all, Director _\- " Maki all but rocketed out of her seat in anger, face red despite herself. She teetered from the hangover and instantly regretted moving at all. "Then I'll be going."_

_"In all seriousness, Maki, I want you to put your all into this. Write up plans, get me some resumes and recommended hires, work out some of the budgetary needs, and put it all in a nice, neat file in time for the budget meeting in 6 months. Can you do that?"_

_Maki nodded. "Absolutely."_

The first person she approached to begin this program was Nico. She couldn't imagine giving anyone else the chance. And despite her unspoken fears - of course unspoken, she knew somewhere in her heart that she'd be proven wrong - Nico managed to receive her therapy certifications while training under Umi. The idol even learned to play, and to teach, music theory and a few instruments quickly enough under Maki's strict tutelage. Only a few months after losing her job and her way of life Nico was already on a new path. Maki never forgot the way the woman's eyes shined with joy, with unshed tears, when she told her that she'd been hired at the hospital.

When they set off for the train station in the gray-blue morning, cool and quiet, Maki still didn't know their final destination. Following the slap of their shoes on the wet-stained pavement was the rumble of luggage wheels rolling and popping off pebbles like tiny bullets. The doctor dourly contemplated the sigh-inducing issue that was getting up for vacation at the same time she'd get up for work on a normal day. Even the route they walked was the same, at least in part, as they dragged their overstuffed rolling suitcases behind themselves. Nico hoarded their train tickets in her cross-body purse and strolled almost jauntily next to the near-shuffling Maki.

"Can you tell me _now_ where we're going?" the doctor tried once more when the grand, almost European train station building came into view. Red bricked, with rectangular windows, a clock, arches and towers, the station maintained an older air than the bustling city of glass and steel, metal and matter, built around it in the intervening years since its construction. Crowds of passengers were piling in before them; the morning rush didn't cease on the weekend, though Maki noticed fewer suits and far more casual outfits.

"How about you just accept the surprise, Maki? I mean, we're, like, _this_ close."

"I hate surprises." She shot back.

They entered the building in the center of the myriad commuters, and before them lead paths to a whole compass of possibilities. One direction lead to trains traveling up north from Tokyo; the 3 others corresponded to other parts of Japan, and a stairway lead below - wide, to hold the impossible crowds - leading to the Tokyo subway system itself. Maki had no idea where to go. She turned to Nico and found the woman searching her purse intently.

"Forget where we're going? Maybe if you'd told me - "

" _Nope_. Just looking for this." She smirked as she pulled a long, black-satin ribbon out of her purse. Wide and shimmering, individual threads catching the overhead light at different spots, the ribbon dangled from Nico's hand as she held it up to Maki's face.

"What's that for?"

"The surprise."

"You don't think...Nico, you don't expect me to _wear a blindfold_ the whole way there. You can't. You're not that far removed from reality."

"Of course I don't expect you to wear it the whole time. I'm not an idiot. But I do expect you to wear it until we get onto the train."

The crowd milled around the women as if they were simply part of the scenery, a pair of columns in the center of the airy room; Maki had no space to step back from Nico. "Absolutely not. Nico, put it away. There's no surprise worth embarrassing myself in public for. Or risking, I don't know, falling down stairs, or something equally horrific."

"Not even for me?"

"Not for your life."

"Maki, look me in the eyes. No, don't look away - look at me." Maki turned to the woman slowly, as if it caused her physical pain. "Nothing's going to happen to you. I'll try to keep people from seeing the blindfold, too."

"Don't be an idiot. I won't do it. Come on, don't look at me like you're disappointed that I said no. You had to have expected me to."

"I'll take it off the second we get on the train." Nico paused, cleared her throat, and glared at the blinking digital clocks along the walls. "Look, this is all part of something really special, and we're going to be late if we don't go soon. _Please_ , just do this for me. It'll all be worth it in the end."

Maki pinched the bridge of her nose and tried hard to calm her nerves. There was just something wrong with what Nico was asking, but - but if that genuinely pleading look on her face spoke at all to what Nico felt about this, then Maki had no choice. Her fingers tingled, and her heart felt heavy in her chest. "...Fine." she forced out.

"What?"

"I'm not going to say it again."

"Great! I knew you'd come around, Maki!"

"I still think this is a terrible idea." She grumbled as Nico worked carefully with her lithe fingers to place the soft satin ribbon over her eyes and tie it in a cute bow at the back of Maki's head. The idol had to stretch on her tip-toes to get it in the right place.

Maki skipped a heartbeat or two as the world suddenly grew black and enclosed, even with the echoes of voices and footsteps reverberating loudly around her in ripples of air. A sensation of claustrophobia overcame her. She knew that the lobby itself was high-ceilinged and spacious, but her body seized in panic nonetheless. She reached out a clenching hand for one of Nico's, but instead felt the woman's hand on the center of her back. She swore that she could see that hand in the artificial darkness as a red pinpoint, as a glowing patch of heat in the center of induced nothingness.

"Don't you worry your pretty little head, Maki. Just trust me."

Maki nodded uncertainly, but at the firm insistence of Nico's hand began to move. Her steps were natural and measured, and more than trying to prevent a fall Maki worked to avoid seeming suspicious or attracting attention. If her footsteps were fine there'd be no reason that strangers should give her a second glance and have time to notice the blindfold. Nico proved to be an adept guide, chatting about nothing in particular as, with the slightest changes in pressure and force from her fingertips and palm, she lead Maki through throngs of busy doctor stumbled once or twice and cursed under her breath. Nico stopped her fall each time without a comment or insult. That, Maki appreciated even more than the guiding hand.

Without the passage of light, of people or storefronts, of rushing trains or colorful advertisements, Maki also lost sense of the passage of time. She didn't know how long Nico had lead her through the crowded station. They had even made it down a set of stairs at some point. In some sense her world simply became the limits of her own conscious and Nico herself, attached through her hand, and the the strength of her arm, and the way her whispers of "Are you okay?" and "Watch your step", and "I told you it wouldn't be so bad" centered Maki. Even the mass voice of the ever-moving crowd became white noise, blank and ignorable, silent in its ubiquity. In spite of her focus on walking, Maki found herself thinking, for a moment too long, about how she and Nico made love. The thought popped up and stuck around like a weed. She couldn't stop comparing the way she was so centered on Nico, her reliance on Nico's voice, the inherent trust it all took, to sex. It was all too similar, and Maki felt exposed, flushing red, as if that was what the people might catch onto from looking at her - her thoughts, clear as day - and not the blindfold.

The soft pads of Nico's fingers pushed towards the left and Maki angled her body in that direction. Beneath her feet the floor sloped gently downwards and the air around her constricted and grew stale. Sounds echoed, cave-like, against where she assumed the walls were. Her heartbeat slowed in betrayal as if she was growing used to the odd situation Nico put her in. At long last the woman stopped beside her, but Maki continued to step forward. The tips of her toes felt oddly unsupported for a split second, and then Nico grabbed at the fabric of her shirt and pulled it tight beneath her fingers. Maki all but stumbled backwards.

"Hey, you're going to stretch out my shirt, Nico."

"You're welcome for not letting you walk off the edge of the platform and on to the tracks, you mean?" Nico answered. Maki couldn't see her face, but guessed that the woman was likely raising an eyebrow in disbelief.

"I wouldn't be in this situation if you didn't make me look like some sexual deviant in public!"

"Maybe you shouldn't yell that so loudly on a crowded platform, you idiot!"

Maki's fists shook at her sides. She bit her tongue to keep from yelling anything more. _Seething_ wasn't exactly how she hoped to feel on the first day of her long awaited vacation.

It was impossible for Maki to judge how long she and Nico stood on the platform in her sort-of-solipsistic world of darkness, but at some point an echoing chime came from the speakers spaced out along the walls. The digitzed voice of a woman called out the destination of the arriving train.

"T _he 7:15 to -_ "

Then silence. Nico's hands came up from behind Maki's head and covered her ears like earmuffs.

"G-get off, Nico!"

But the furtive plea was blown away by the rush of the train coming through the tunnel, by the gust of air against Maki's bare cheeks, and similarly scattered Nico's response to the wind before the train sighed into a complete stop. The pneumatic hiss of the doors preceded the return of Nico's hand to the small of Maki's back. Under Nico's urging Maki walked forward into the train, once more reminded of her nervousness about stares. She reached up to remove the blindfold but Nico intertwined their fingers and pulled her, gently, towards a seat. Maki's knees bumped against it before she turned around to sit. The seat was hard beneath her.

Following the sound of the doors closing, the train began to inch along and speed up steadily as if testing itself. Maki felt Nico pull at a single length of the satin ribbon in one long motion, and It fell away from her eyes with the same intensity of waking late in the afternoon with the sun already bright and blinding. She cleared her eyes, blinking away the bothersome light, and then glared at Nico.

"What?" she gave an unamused, challenging look back. "This'll all be worth it. Trust me."

"You keep saying that, but I'm not seeing the proof."

"Calm down and stop being so impatient, doctor." Nico's smirk returned, "You know well enough about how bad high blood pressure can be."

Outside of the train's wide, clear windows the scenery passed in blurred bursts of beauty. Maki was struck - though she wouldn't show it - by the ever-increasing greenery and nature appearing not all that far from Tokyo. Pastoral fields spread out like emerald swatches under a bright blue sky. Pines and oaks and maples stood strong and sure past these fields, and sequences of shade and shine claimed the forest floors. And then as suddenly as the trees started past the fields they once again thinned, disappearing entirely in time to present rocky crags, isolated cliffs, and the expansive sea far beyond, deep indigo and glittering with sun and foam like a summer night's sky. That made only two things Maki knew about the trip: their destination was likely towards the south, probably on the way to Okinawa, and quite some distance away, far enough that she should, in Nico's own words "get comfortable".

She didn't know how many times she'd said it, but Maki hated surprises. She chalked it up to a discomfort with unknowns in general - as a a doctor, and before that, as a hard-working student, she relied on knowledge. On _knowing_ , and that was the exact opposite to the whole idea of a surprise. Nico seemed to take a special pleasure in surprising Maki. Through the relatively short amount of time they'd known one another, Maki could recall an obscene amount of surprises Nico had thrown her way: surprise dinners, when Maki arrived home from an exhausting day to a warm meal and an apron-clad idol; surprise presents, when Maki would find some small trinket of affection on her pillow or in her fridge or in her pockets; surprise kisses; surprise, though not unwanted, touches. Not all surprises were bad, she realized, but they left her sanding dumbfounded beyond a protective pout about how to react to Nico's surprisingly wonderful adoration.

One of those surprise touches - or at least an unexpected one - was going on there, on the train. Around Maki's tense shoulders Nico wrapped her arm and drew Maki close. Even something like this colored Maki's cheeks, and in an effort to find something to say she glanced around the train car. For a Saturday morning it was oddly sparse. There were a few older couples, and a young family with a two restless children Maki figured were on their way to visit family members. Another clue appeared about where they were going: seemingly nowhere too popular, if the lack of people meant anything. She averted her eyes as she shuffled just a little closer into Nico's body.

After a long lull, a gaping gulf of travel-induced quiet, Nico asked Maki a question that the doctor couldn't hear. The clunk of the train tracks overtook her words before she spoke up again.

"Do you remember Ruby Kurosawa?"

The question, like a dandelion in a sidewalk crack, seemed to have sprouted from nothing. The former idol's face was an impossible mask; she checked the nails on the hand that wasn't resting on Maki's shoulder. Nico went on. "Cute little redhead, tough older sister. Ring any bells?"

"She had that heart transplant. Not to mention some amazing luck. She was only on the list for a few months if I remember right. Why?"

"No real reason. It's just that we're going on a vacation for our one year anniversary and I couldn't stop remembering how we got together. She played a part, you know."

Maki averted her eyes, blushing. "Well, uh yeah. Hard to...forget...a lot of the stuff that we, uh - don't make me remember this on the train, Nico."

"We did more than just _that_ that week, Maki, but I can't say I'm surprised at where your thoughts went. If only you were pure, like an idol - the maybe you wouldn't get embarrassed in public like this."

"Shut up."

Just about three hours passed before the train slid into a rolling stop in a clean, white train station. Instantly the briny scent of the sea filled Maki's head. It hung in the air in spite of the other competing, overwhelming scents around: scents of people, of heated concrete, of gently swaying oaks. As she stepped out of the train Maki saw the rectangular sign hanging above the station. It said that they were in Numazu, a city she had only heard of in passing. She looked questioningly at Nico.

"Don't get too comfy, Maki. We have a little more traveling to do."

"Literally _how_? Where are we going, Nico?"

"An idol never gives away the final song at the beginning of a concert, does she?"

"Good thing you're not an idol any more, then." Maki crossed her arms. It was a low blow and she knew it, but containing her frustration had always been hard for the doctor.

"Oi! - Ah, wait, let me get this."

With a practiced flourish Nico pulled her ringing phone from her purse and walked a few meters away from Maki. She answered and Maki watched as she spoke in low, harried sentences, whispering words Maki couldn't make out above the ambient noise of the train station. Nico didn't exactly look happy, but Maki didn't think she looked upset either. The purse of her lips, the crease in her brow, the slump of her shoulders - Maki might've guessed her girlfriend's mood was closer to exasperated, or maybe exhausted. She tried to listen closer but at that moment the roaring rush of a train leaving the station drowned out even her thoughts. By the time the train passed, Nico had hung up and was already on her way back to Maki.

"And that was?"

"An old producer of mine." Nico shrugged. But before Maki could continue, "Let's begin the next leg of our trip! You're closer to the end of the mystery than you think."

"I wouldn't know. A certain someone hasn't even told me where we're going yet."

"For a person who deals with patients, you really have very little - "

"Finish that statement, I dare you." Maki rolled her eyes and began walking towards the station exit, but Nico reached for her hand and intertwined their fingers. Maki slinked back, hiding the blush that continued to show despite how long she'd been with Nico. Her hand was sweaty; it was stifling in the station, humid like a sauna, and she weakly tried pulling away from Nico in embarrassment. The other woman didn't let go.

"We've got a connecting train here, and when we get off of _that_ one, we'll be where we need to be. Mostly, anyway." Nico nodded confidently.

Maki found it hard not to smile back, especially when it dawned on her just how cute Nico looked in her white blouse and black skirt. She forced a pout in the smile's place instead. It was all she could do not to melt right there.

The connecting line from Numazu to Uchiura - a town Maki hadn't ever heard of - took less time than the previous train ride. The small town was in the outskirts of the city at the edge of a peninsula. A quick Internet search on the train ride in, after the conductor's announcement foiled this part of Nico's surprise plan, told Maki that the town had once been a fairly important fishing community. In the wake of the modern day its decline was inevitable but not disastrous, a middle-aged man of a town. When they arrived and stepped off of the train the afternoon sun had brightened through the heavy, leaden humility. Maki found herself wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. She turned imploringly to her girlfriend. Nico was fiddling with her phone, though she hid the device against her chest when she noticed Maki looking at her. Where they were headed was still a mystery and the doctor felt her body sag at the thought of having to travel any more in the overwhelming heat of the day. There was a breeze coming off the sea in soft wafts like the trembling of the air after a passerby, but it was hardly a remedy. With a heavy sigh Maki began to ask just where they were going when she noticed that Nico didn't seem perturbed by the weather at all. She wasn't sweating, sagging, or swooning. Maki changed her question.

"How are you so...okay in this heat?" she asked, unconsciously wiping her head to highlight the point.

Nico smirked. Her scarlet eyes were bright and dangerous even then, in the daylight. "How do you think it feels to dance your heart out on stage for hours under spotlights? Or what about public appearances? Do you know how long I used to stand out in the streets for fan meet-n-greets?" she winked. Maki wanted to either pummel her or kiss her right then. Maybe both. "Just one more power being an idol gave me - it's not that the heat isn't gross, Maki, I'm just good at hiding it."

From the station Nico lead Maki down what appeared to be the main road of the town. The road sloped gently, following the natural curve of what must've been a giant hill, as far as Maki could see and further still. She sighed, exasperated, already too warm in her beige capris, navy blouse, and white cotton button-up, which was tied in a knot below the bottom button. Grand, verdant oaks like those in a story book followed the curve of the inner side of the road all the way down, and towered up a stone retaining wall while on the opposite shoulder Maki could see the sea or the bay - she wasn't sure which - and the reflective steel guard-rail protecting people from falling down into it. Maki hurried beneath the heavenly shade; Nico took her time following, and Maki admired the woman from afar. It'd been a year. It had been over a year and Maki still found herself almost breathless, traitorously so, at how attracted she was to Nico. At how attractive Nico was in general. And worse of all, Nico knew it. There was a certain smirk, a special twinkle in her eye, that appeared whenever Nico noticed Maki noticing her. And there, while crossing the empty road, Maki saw that expression bright and clear.

"Happy to see the town, or is it just me?"

"Neither. What's it to you?"

"Oh, nothing. I'm just going to wait til after my surprise later. You won't be able to keep your hands off me, let alone your eyes."

"Speaking of this dumb surprise, can you get us there already?"

"An idol shows up on time, when the lights are low and the fans are at the edge of their seats, and definitely not before that. We'll get there on time, and not a moment earlier." Nico flipped a hand in the air nonchalantly. "But in the meantime, why don't we enjoy the time that passes?"

Maki sighed loudly. Gripping the handle of her luggage she started her walk down the shady winding road without waiting for Nico. "That bit about enjoying time as it passes makes you sound like an old man."

"Well I _am_ older than you, Maki." Nico placed a hand on her proudly puffed chest when she caught up to Maki. "You'll learn one of these days, when you finally grow up."

"That's real funny, considering how old you look."

"Hey!"

The couple took their time walking beneath the cool shade. Uchiura didn't stretch out before them so much as it unfolded like a hand-fan, spreading in a wide arc around a central point. As they rounded the slope of the hill Maki caught most of the town in her sights: small neighborhoods dotted between forested areas; an old _ryokan_ inn beside a set of modern homes; squat shops and eateries with their paint faded and peeling from the salty breeze coming off the bay; and all of it quiet, subdued, in the heat of the afternoon like a town asleep. Maki lazily grabbed for Nico's hand and went along with the gentle swing with which Nico swung them. Maki raised her eyebrows in appreciated surprise when they passed an old red-lacquered _torii_ gate above a set of stone steps leading to a shrine. With the way the steps were worn smooth and the aged lantern posts on the either side of the _torii_ caught the light, with the general serious look of the place, she felt a kind of respect grow within her. In a city like Tokyo even the shrines exhibited an atmosphere of modernity, of worldliness. Here, in a small, dying town, was a shrine that had the reverent and somber air of a truly religious place. Maki stopped before the stone steps and felt Nico tug slightly on her hand. She shook her head, took a breath, and walked on.

Closer to the bottom of the hill they came to the entrance of a beach whose shore circled the cerulean waters of the bay. A wooden pier jutted straight out into the waves. Water slapped against it rhythmically like a hand on drums. On one end of the cove was a shop with a name running across the top. Maki could just make out the word "Diving" below a name she couldn't see in smaller font. Across from that, on the very far end of the other side of the bay, a grand building stood stalwart on the shore all window and stone and opulence. Maki saw Nico checking her phone when she looked away from the building.

"Time yet, or was that another one of your mysterious phone calls?"

"We've got a little bit to wait, and we're pretty close. Let's go to the beach!"

Without waiting for Maki's answer Nico launched herself across the sand, kicking it up behind her like the wake of a boat. Her footsteps cratered the sand in little meteor impacts; without a breeze they remained, like a path, for Maki to follow. She stopped to slip off her shoes and dangled them off of two fingers. Nico's were flood refuse, thrown haphazardly on the coarse sand.

"You know," Nico began when Maki reached her at the edge of the water. "My very last photo-shoot was at a beach." the former idol's face was obscured in the glare of the sun, until Maki watched her look down to the water rushing over their feet. Maki sunk an inch into the wet sand when the waves pulled back. The pull of the water on her ankles was like the pull of her heart at Nico's words. "I mean, the beach I was at was _much_ more glamorous than some fishtown bay, but you get the picture."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

Somewhere a seagull shrieked. Maki thought she could see it coasting on a breeze in the blue sky above, looking like a flat shadow as it passed below one of the lonely clouds in the sky. She didn't look at Nico. Her face felt hot. A strange and unwanted pit opened like a sinkhole in her solar plexus. It took a few moments for her to find the words she was looking for. "Do you...miss it?" she forced out, covering the insecurity with a flippant lilt and shrug at the end of the sentence.

"Nope!" the 'p' sound popped off of Nico's lips. At that she turned to Maki with a smile, a glow greater even then the burning sun warming Maki's skin. Relief flooded through the doctor. Wonderful relief. She turned to Nico herself and grinned, tucking a strand of Bordeaux hair behind an ear like a schoolgirl. She felt giddy like one, vulnerable like one, and an adolescent embarrassment followed that childish glee. Still, she didn't stop smiling. "I don't miss it at all. I'm really, really glad I got to be an idol for so long. It was my dream, after all. But now, being a music therapist - it's great. And I'm great at it. Just like I expected."

"Haughty even though you're talking about helping others? You're terrible."

" _Plus_ I get to work in the same place as you every day."

"Flattery will get you nowhere."

"That smile says otherwise, Maki dear."

* * *

When at last the sun began to set Nico shook Maki's shoulder and pulled her from wherever she'd traveled in her mind. When Maki came to her senses the smell of the bay and the sound of the surf and the heat of the sun were like a precursor to their week in Okinawa, if not somehow more intimate, more personal, there in a dying town. They'd been laying on the sand for some time. Maki might've drifted off to sleep at some point, but the confusion of a summer nap is the same in a bed or on the beach. Their rolling luggage lay behind them undisturbed. Maki shook the settled blood from her limbs, then dusted the sand off of her clothing, out of her hair. Nico seemed to be checking directions again.

"Is your heart pounding, Maki? We're minutes away from the surprise!"

"It's only natural to keep my expectations low." the doctor rolled her eyes. They were back on that slowly winding road. "I'd be an idiot to get excited for something that I know nothing about."

"Wow, I guess I was right yesterday; there's no way you were a fun kid. Were your birthday parties exclusively planned by you and you alone?"

"I didn't have birthday parties growing up, per say." Maki admitted. "I just never wanted one."

"You're not kidding, are you? That's it - next year, I'm throwing you the biggest party I can. One fit for - and designed by - an idol."

"Next year." She let the last word drag a bit. "So, you expect - "

"Don't even try to doubt it, Maki." Nico pulled the other women in by the collar and kissed her roughly, lovingly. "We're going to be together forever."

The idol released Maki as quickly as she'd grabbed her and then walked before her at a quicker place. They were close now. Maki could feel it. She figured that Nico wanted to be in the lead for some surprise-related reason, and willingly slowed her own steps; if she couldn't get out of this surprise she could at least delay the inevitable. Still, even with the change of pace, they reached the destination in a matter of minutes. Between huddled oaks on the road opened an entrance flanked by stone pillars, each topped with lanterns. A path of wide stone steps, aged smooth and sunbaked, lead from the entrance up to a flat stone courtyard. Perfectly manicured greenery in deep jade was planted beside beds of pale lilies and bright red poppies. At the top a long, flat traditional Japanese manor caught the deep golden sun against its sloped brown roof shingles. It seemed to be a well cared-for vestige of an older time.

"Can you finally tell me where we are?"

"And ruin the surprise right at the end? Not on your life. Besides, someone's coming to greet us now anyway." Nico pointed to a girlish figure making its way down the steps, the clicking and clacking of her shoes echoing against the stone into the wide, empty sky-space around the manor. Maki stopped at the entrance and and gripped the handle of her luggage tightly. Nico, beside her, was entirely relaxed - poised, posed, and smiling.

Dressed in a dandelion-yellow _yukata_ , the young girl bent at her waist and gripped her knees to catch her breath when she finally reached Maki and Nico. She stood back up straight after a few moments and smoothed out the wrinkles in her clothing. Before she said anything she grinned brightly, contrasting the shade above the manor like a small sun. Her round, rosy cheeks dimpled with her smile. Honey brown, her hair hung straight down her back and, when she bowed, it softly fell from down the sides of her shoulders.

"Hello! Ah'm - _I'm_ Hanamaru Kunikida. Are y'all - _you two_ \- Nico Yazawa and Maki Nishikino?" she asked. Hanamaru had the heavy accent of a rural town local. Maki looked beside her to see Nico raising an eyebrow in question.

"Yeah, that's us."

"Then please follow me!" the girl grinned wider - Maki didn't know that that was possible - and after a bow started to walk back towards the manor. With a shrug Nico followed, and Maki caught up seconds later. Their rolling bags echoed around the courtyard as loud as Hanamaru's sandals. They were lead to the manor's main entrance, a sliding door framed with a cross pattern of wooden supports. Maki reached forward to open it, but her arm was pulled down by Nico. Hanamaru nodded with an appreciatory expression.

"Ah'm - _I'm_ supposed to keep things in a specific order." she explained, beaming. "So please wait fer - _for_ me to take you where you need to go."

It was hard for Maki to bite her tongue, listening to the adorable struggle Hanamaru seemed to be having trying to keep the local dialect from slipping into her formal and courtly speech. A moment later the younger girl slid the door open and gestured for the women to walk ahead of her. They walked into a small foyer.

"Take off your shoes, please."

"Right." Maki pouted, but she did as she was told. She watched Nico do the same, admiring the curve of her girlfriend's back and the length of her legs, with a look she knew she should likely be hiding. There were two sets of in-door sandals waiting for the women there in the foyer.

"Can we leave the luggage here?" Maki asked, to distract herself more than anything.

"Ya bet! I - uh - I mean, certainly!"

When the women were ready Hanamaru lead them deeper into the manor. They traveled down a long, thin hallway over wood paneling waxed cleanly and nearly mirror-reflective. Every few feet they passed rooms with sliding doors, all of which were closed, and Maki figured that the _ryokan_ inn down the hill likely looked similar to this. The air in the place was cool on Maki's skin. The only part of the manor that appeared modern were the fluorescent lights brightening their path. Maki swore she could smell food wafting in from somewhere further into the home, there at the end of the hallway where it split into two paths like a "T.

"You smell that too, right?" she asked Nico. The other woman turned to her reluctantly, pulling her eyes off of the manor walls and the classical flower prints posted between doors. The beautiful flowers were outlined in deep black brush strokes.

"I always wanted to live in a house like this as a kid." Nico answered instead. "I couldn't leave modern conveniences behind, but the place is beautiful."

"How did you find it? What are we doing here?"

None of Maki's questions were answered, however, when Hanamaru stopped at the end of the hallway. She bowed once more before gesturing to the right with her hand. Rather than the continuation of the hallway Maki expected to see, it instead lead directly to a large room.

"Right through there is yer - your surprise!" Hanamaru said. Her cheeks glowed rosy red and her eyes sparkled in a way that made Maki embarrassed for a moment, as if her cynicism was some stain on the innocent girl standing before her. She thanked the girl and walked into the room without much else. Unlike earlier, Nico let her lead the way. She was already smug, brilliantly confident without any apparent reason. The corners of her lips turned upwards and those ruby eyes bright like spotlights, or searchlights.

Copper-green tatami mats covered the floor of the large room, and squished beneath Maki's feet as she walked in. In the center of the room a long wooden table, low to the ground, was surrounded by soft square pillows. The table was already made up with traditional place settings: chopsticks, bowls, _chawan_ tea cups and all of this orbited an intricate and beautiful bouquet of flowers stretching high out of a simple porcelain vase. One wall of the room was just that - a wall, with a sliding door leading into another room but the opposite side was made up entirely of a larger set of sliding doors that opened up to the courtyard outside. Maki could barely make out the flashbulb lights of fireflies blinking and fading in an undiscovered but alluring pattern through the wall-sized sliding doors.

Stepping to the end of the table, Nico made a low whistling sound. "Some place, huh? You can start praising my taste now, you know." She sat down and patted the pillow beside her. Maki obeyed, but glared at Nico from the corner of her eyes anyway. She hated not being in the know - hated the lack of control over the situation, and after a whole day of this Nico-induced ignorance she was at the end of her rope.

"Sitting in a stranger's house isn't exactly my idea of a happy surprise."

Instead of a smarmy comment, as Maki expected, Nico laid a small, warm hand on Maki's thigh. She didn't say anything; right then, the sliding door to the other room opened like a gaping mouth, and the room on the other side was strangely dark - physical and inky. Maki sat up straighter. Beside her, Nico let out a relaxed sigh. Maki sucked in a breath herself when two people stepped through the door.

"R-ruby? Dia Kurosawa?" she forced out. Maki blinked, shook her head, blinked again, and then turned to look at Nico to answers for questions that wouldn't leave her lips. Nico smirked, and then gently turned Maki's face back to the Kurosawas with her fingertips.

In a set of kimonos, pink and red respectively, the Kurosawa sisters entered the room and bowed. Dia lacked both the anger and desperation that had been her ever-present expression in the hospital. Ruby, biting her lip just a little, had the bright but shy smile that Maki expected hid behind the pained grin she wore as a patient.

"What is this?" Maki asked.

"Welcome to our home, Dr. Nishikino, Ms. Yazawa." Dia smiled. The beauty mark on her cheek moved with her grin.

"Nico, explain."

"What's there to explain? Dia here emailed me a few months back about, like, thanking us for everything."

"You saved my little sister," Dia interrupted. "I owe you my life." She said it so seriously that, for a moment, Maki expected to hear an offer about becoming her bodyguard.

"That's my _job_." Maki resisted. "I help patients get better. I get paid good money for doing it. Whatever life-debt you think you owe me isn't - "

" _Anyway_ ," Nico broke in again. Maki's heart was beating far too quickly for someone sitting around a table. "I said that to her about the idol show too, but Dia insisted that they could host us if we were ever in the area. I figured hey, why not? It's an anniversary gift, all things considered."

"This - this is too much." Maki shook her head slowly. Her throat was dry. "I'm not some small town physician or family doctor. In the hospital we see patients until they're well, and then rarely ever again. This is...this is..."

"There's really no need to be so self-conscious, Maki. Yeah, maybe this is weird for you, but hey, it's not a bad weird, is it? You have to loosen up a bit." Nico interjected. She patted Maki's stiff back a few times.

"...No, it's not a _bad_ weird, but - ."

"Then t-thank you for coming!" Ruby raised her little voice. Her cherry twintails shook as she thrust a fist in the air. "We're going to have lots of good food and fun!"

More challenges rose in the doctor's throat like bile. This wasn't what she was used to. It wasn't how things worked. She cringed at the further complication of even more of the doctor/patient relationships in her life. Something in her shirked back in fear at what seeing Ruby again meant; a self-revelation of her own handiwork, of the handiwork of the surgeon, of the heart that wasn't originally Ruby's. She swallowed this all down, however, tried to smooth away the discomfort like wrinkles in a bed spread. It wasn't a _bad_ weird. Her shoulders fell in self defeat and she let out a breath, and then gave a cautious half-smile. "Well, I guess I'm already here."

The last time that Maki and Ruby had met had been about a month after her surgery, six or seven months before this surprise dinner, as a check-up to make sure nothing was going wrong with the new heart. Ruby sat on an exam table with her shirt off, blushing in some mixture of embarrassment and shame; a large pink scar ran vertically between the girl's breasts. Maki examined the healing scar with gloved hands, and read the results of blood tests and suppression medication, the results of home care and medical procedures to the patient and her sister, who sat attentively in a chair by the bed. It was all good news - Ruby was healthy, and her body wasn't rejecting the foreign organ. But the girl looked distracted. She kept glancing at her chest and looking away nervously.

"Don't be embarrassed by the scar," Maki all but ordered. "It's a symbol that you survived."

After that Maki had referred them to a local doctor she trusted who worked closer to their home for the remaining check-ups. She hadn't expected to meet those two ever again. She exited the room without looking back, as she did with all of her other patients. Her job was done. The patient was healthy. All was well, or as well as it could be.

Never could she have imagined sitting around a table like she was then, with Nico, the Kurosawas, and Hanamaru, chatting and eating like friends. The sisters and Hanamaru carried in food from the room where they'd first entered. There was a large bowl of rice, grilled salmon with crisp gunmetal skin and sunset pink-orange flesh, a collection of pickled and grilled vegetables piled high and wafting deliciously, along with other steaming plates of food. A veritable feast, and all of it prepared throughout the day by the sisters. Now that the surprise was revealed Nico looked content and relaxed, and scooted closer to Maki. The doctor could hardly decipher how she herself felt: annoyance blended with discomfort and pride and embarrassed happiness, and all of these emotions clamored and swirled against one another almost painfully. She knew, even under all that, that she appreciated what Nico had done for her. They were all sitting seiza and underneath the table Maki clenched the hem of Nico's shirt in a tight fist, her hand curled up in its softness.

"How is it," Maki tried after a sip of green tea to calm her nerves, "...school. I mean. Now that you've gone back."

"It feels really nice to be back in class with all of my friends, Dr. Nishikino." Ruby set her chopsticks down and lowered her head. "Thanks to you, I - "

"Stop." Maki ordered. She felt the heat of her own cheeks, the nervous swelling in her abdomen like she was free-falling. "You and your sister have thanked me enough. I can't be a fr...more than just a doctor to either of you if you don't start treating me normally."

The sounds of dinner - clinking plates, tiny slurps, shuffling clothes - stopped with Maki's declaration. Her cheeks burned hotter. She turned to Nico, who looked back at her with an expression somewhere between amused and impressed, a fine black eyebrow raised and a smirk playing at her lips. Across the table Dia regarded her critically and Ruby bit her lip. Hanamaru reached out to pluck some _umeboshi_ from the center of the table, excusing herself from the semi-standoff occurring around her.

"W-well then, doc - Maki. I'm very, very happy to be back! It's...it's so great to see all my friends again!"

Dia, who had waited patiently for the end of Ruby's confession, broke out into a wide smile of her own. "And for my own part, I'm back to worrying about all of those everyday dangers again." she rubbed her sister's head. "But that's better than the things I had to worry about this time last year."

With that Maki finally let loose a deeply-held breath and relaxed as best as she could. Strange or not, she could only try to enjoy the situation, to accept the praise and thanks, to acclimate herself to seeing a patient whose life she literally saved there in the flesh - living, breathing, and experiencing sorrow and joy once more. It all seemed to go against the very tenets of her medical training. It went against severing her heartstrings, and against not growing attached to patients, because they all left at the end. Because they could die. Because she could fail. From the very beginning this is what she'd been told. And yet, the Kurosawas in front of her - a success story - and Nico stood against those very rules. Nico, there beside her, a woman for whom she broke too many rules and practices to even count. A woman, a patient, who'd stolen her heart. If that too wasn't some sign that it wasn't always wrong to go against what she'd been told, she didn't know what was.

They chatted about all sorts of things over dinner. How Dia was doing, now that she could focus on her own schooling a bit more ("I am very near the top of the class, as I'm sure you'd expect."). Who, exactly, Hanamaru was ("Ah'm - _I'm_ Ruby's best friend!"). What Ruby was planning to do after school ("I'm - I'm thinking about working in the fashion industry."). Dia even asked after what Nico ended up doing in her post-idol life. The woman cracked her knuckles, smirked, and said proudly that she was now a music therapist at the hospital. At her pride, Maki couldn't help but glow too.

As dinner winded down Hanamaru began to clear the table. Dia left for the kitchen, and when she returned she was carrying a tray of empty cups and a porcelain carafe filed with sake. She placed a cup before Maki and Nico, and then one for herself there on the table, while Ruby looked on. When she poured the clear liquid into the cups, she seemed to truly embody the _yamato nadeshiko_ aesthetic, completing the combination that'd already included the manor and her clothing and her long black hair with short, even bangs. Nico nodded in the younger girl's direction, her twintails bobbing along with her head.

"One sip won't hurt, right?"

"Well, if only because this whole thing is about my dear Ruby, I suppose I can make an exception. Do you want some as well, Ruby?"

"Y-yes, please."

Dia poured her sister about half of what she'd given the others, and did the same for Hanamaru. It was then that Maki watched NIco's eyes grow wide, as if in danger. The former idol slammed her hands against the table and pointed a thin finger at Ruby.

"Don't think that this means that the universe's greatest idol supports underage drinking! And don't tell this to any of your friends - I've got a reputation to keep up, you know!"

"O-of course I won't, Ms. - Ms. Nico-nii!"

Maki slowly rotated the small saucer in her hands. The sake was clear like water, reflective, and caught the shine of the overhead light. She was beginning to feel uncomfortable even on the pillow beneath her knees. Her family never had been very traditional. When she looked over to Nico she saw that the woman had long given up on sitting properly. Instead she sat cross-legged, the hem of her skirt only barely long enough to still be considered tasteful. Maki looked back up and noticed Dia staring at her, waiting to catch her attention.

"Let's drink to good health." the older Kurosawa offered, though in her haughty voice and confident tone it was more of an order.

"To good health!" everyone else at the table repeated. Maki sipped her sake, cold and smooth. The stinging, almost lightly astringent after-taste coated the back of her throat as it traveled downwards. Ruby spluttered the drink out of her mouth, eyes closed and pouting in disgust. Both Hanamaru and Dia, on the other hand, sipped diligently, their eyes closed in appreciation or politeness. Nico made a show of swigging hers from the cup and audibly gulped. Maki shook her head, sure that that last action killed whatever proper idea of idols Ruby had left.

"We had a great night!" Nico smiled her Nico-nii grin when the hosts walked their guests back to the foyer. Maki slipped her shoes on and stood, still feeling slightly awkward, with her back straight and her hands in her pockets balled, then fidgeting in impatience. Despite what they'd discussed, Maki couldn't help but feel out of place just a bit. Just enough to show it. Still, she smiled as she well as she could, violet eyes wide and mostly upturned lips.

"Yeah, it was delicious. You two - you were great hosts." Maki lowered her head. Her scarlet hair hair fell a bit on her shoulders and she felt Nico's soft hand push it back into place.

"Our sincerest pleasure." Dia bowed. Ruby and Hanamaru followed.

"I know you said not to - to thank you again, but I have to. Thank you so much, both of you!" Ruby exclaimed.

Maki blinked back a strong welling behind her eyes, and then, with her bag in hand and a short wave, she and Nico left the house. The night was warm, only slightly less so than the day, and the leftover heat of the sun radiated in invisible waves from the stone ground. A bay breeze, not cool but cooler, ticked her skin. Maki couldn't stop remembering the final conversation she had with the Kurosawa's before the surgery. Even in the best-case scenario Ruby's donor heart might only last 10 years, statistically. The stresses, the risk, the eventual end - telling all of that to the Kurosawas had been a nightmare, a crazed, unending nightmare for Maki. The worlds tumbled back down her throat every time she opened her mouth. And yet, the sisters were happy. Ecstatic even for that span of time. With all of her training, Maki still didn't think she'd react the same way. She glanced at Nico, strolling casually beside her, and pictured what she hated to - some accident, some killer disease, some harmful infection: if Nico's best bet was but a band-aid, could she cheer? Could she smile in joy? She tried to shake the visions from her consciousness and failed. Nico looked over and a moment later took her hand, intertwining their fingers. Maki was sweating again, and embarrassed about it again, but the comfort was much more important. They walked back through the entrance where they'd first come in and stood beside the glowing orange lanterns. Light flickered and fidget against their skin.

"Bet you didn't expect all that." Nico boasted, though her gaze was soft, cautious, and Maki felt her eyes roam.

"Even with that hint earlier, on the train - I couldn't have imagined that this was where we were going."

"I'm good, I know. But I wanna hear you say it." Nico bumped Maki's hip with her own and, despite herself, the doctor smiled.

"Maybe I would, but we _both_ know that this is just your repayment for the way I got you a job."

" _Got me?_ " Nico scoffed. "I blew your expectations out of the water. Admit that, too."

Maki paused. She looked up to the sky. "...Yeah, you did. You're annoyingly good at that."

"That was _way_ too easy." Nico poked Maki's cheek, and the doctor slapped her hand away. "Are you really Maki, or did you and Ruby switch places. You've both got that red hair - "

Roughly, almost harshly, Maki pulled Nico by the chin into a hard kiss, lips crushing lips, tongues at war. She let her go a moment later, then looked ahead as if nothing happened. She loved the taste of Nico, the struggle and release, even though she kept herself in check more often than not. She watched, from the corner of her eye, as Nico touched her own lips with a fingertip. Her nails were painted coral pink.

"I guess it really is you. Only you would turn something cute and sweet like a kiss into a fight."

"Don't act like you don't enjoy it. And don't say that like I can't be sweet sometimes!" Maki turned, then, shaking her head. She ran a hand through her hair and looked up and down the main road. It was clear. There wasn't a car in sight, and the street was deeply black despite the age of the road, barely brightening under the bright white moon above. A breeze rustled the oak trees that had served earlier as shade. "Where are we headed? Do you know the train schedule off the top of your head, or?"

"Oh? I suppose you didn't expect there to be a second surprise did you, Maki?" Nico grinned, learning closer to the woman. " _Always_ expect an encore with an idol."

Pushing the obvious response back, Maki instead asked. "That doesn't answer my question. Where are we going? Where am I walking to?"

"You still want me to spoil it? I kept that surprise under wraps, why not this one too?"

"Don't cross your arms like a _child_ , Nico. The least you can tell me is what direction I'm supposed to walk towards."

"Just follow me." she answered, and began to walk up the hill without waiting for Maki at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!


	10. After Story pt. 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would first like to thank everyone who has read this story and responded. I can't express how grateful I am, and how nice it is to know I'm not simply yelling into the void. I don't know if I'll ever write another NicoMaki story again, but considering I felt the same after "In the Morning", I make no promises either way. I really do love these two.
> 
> All of the quotes used before the chapters in this story were from novels I read when I was writing this fic. Each of them helped center me. I'd recommend them all (Samantha Harvey's "Dear Thief" the most, considering it kicked me into high gear to write this), with the heads-up that none of them are lesbian/yuri related.
> 
> This fic means a ton to me, and I'm glad that I can finally bring it to a close.
> 
> Enjoy~

_"...It's different now...this is my perception but she is present within it or spread throughout it. I sense her, feel her, I know that she occupies something within me that allows these moments to happen."_

Zero K \- Don Delillo

* * *

Not too long after, with the moon still in the same place, with the dark of the night still the same shade of rural indigo, they arrived at last at the ostentatious manor Maki had seen before from the pier at the shore. It loomed large up close, not menacingly but imposing, a building built to be noticed. Bright lights hidden skillfully behind hedges lit up the face of the hotel. From their position by the door Maki couldn't read the name emblazoned atop the building in gold lettering, yelling for all the world to see who created this city structure in a dying town. Side by side they walked through the ornate double doors and through to the grand lobby. Maki looked at the expensive interior: the polished oak walls, the taught leather seats and heavy oak desks and the impeccably clean patterned rug; it all seemed very _Fitzgerald_ to her. Some low-volume swing was even drifting in from speakers hidden around the room. It was a far cry from the traditional Japanese home they'd only just left. The difference gave Maki a kind of perceptive vertigo, as if she'd crossed time and space on the short night stroll with Nico.

While Maki was taking in the sights, Nico took initiative and marched to the concierge desk. There was a young woman behind it, the only staff in sight, and she wore a very clean, well designed uniform like she was proud to do so. Her shoulder-length gray hair appeared natural, not the product of aging or stress or coloring, but the cloud color of a salty sea storm. Clipped to her ample chest was a name-tag reading _Watanabe You._

"Reservation for two under Yazawa, please." Nico cut right to the chase in an otherwise excited tone.

"Yazawa?" the woman repeated. She bent her head to study the computer screen. The machine was out of place in the out-of-time room. Maki walked over and stood beside Nico. She glanced at the leather-banded golden watch on her left wrist.

"Ah, got it!" You beamed. "It turns out that you were upgraded, free of charge, to our exclusive suite! What a deal!"

The doctor turned to Nico disappointedly. "Was _this_ the surprise? Showing off how rich you are isn't very _you_ , Nico." she looked questioningly at the woman behind the desk. "Did she put you up to this?"

"No, no, the hotel itself was my surprise. I had no clue about any room upgrades or anything. And you know as well as I do that I rarely check my emails." Nico crossed her arms. "Geeze, just what do you think of me, Maki?"

"It's not a mistake?" The doctor asked the concierge.

"Nope! So if you'll follow me, I'll take you up to our best room."

The women trailed behind You in the oddly silent lobby until they reached the elevator. Although its bright blinking buttons spoke to some sort of modernity, the interior of the elevator matched the aesthetic of the rest of the hotel with its polished cherry-wood walls and gilded accents. Above the opening to the door was a counter for the floors that looked like it came straight from the American 1920's. A gleaming golden gate unfolded accordion-style where a door would be before the elevator rose smoothly to the top floor. They stepped out of the elevator car into a carpeted hallway, and the concierge woman lead Nico and Maki down towards an ornate wooden door.

"This is our best room, and it's almost always booked. You guys are really lucky!" she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small plastic key-card, and then handed it to Nico. "Enjoy!" she beamed. Maki turned to watch her walk back to the elevator, but Nico gripped her hand and pulled her into the room.

Maki couldn't fight the smile on her face when she took in the sight of their beautiful suite. If the lobby was fancy, this was downright excessive. All of the furniture was well-crafted and hand-stitched, set with golden accents inlaid in the sofa and the armchair, and bordering the long coffee table in between the furniture. Small marble sculptures decorated the tops of narrow shelving along the walls. The floor was covered in something so soft and white Maki almost didn't want to call it something as mundane as a carpet, and all this lent the room a luxurious vibe. Off to one side of the main sitting room was a furnished kitchenette, and on the other side a bedroom, which was where Maki headed first. The bed frame was like a king's; it sat on sturdy oak legs with a wide half-circle headboard detailed with hand-carved angels. Aside from the bed there was a closet where Nico carelessly threw her belongings and a marble-floored bathroom where Maki spied a combination bathtub/jacuzzi along with a glass-walled shower stall. She had the burning urge to thank Nico for all of this, or to push her up against the rich mahogany wall and devour her ceaselessly in the place of thanks.

"This place is alright." she said instead.

"What a way to top the night, eh?" Nico asked, already heading into the bathroom. She held a change of clothes in one hand, something sheer and lacy and creamy white. Maki's face grew warm, uncomfortably so. She coughed to ignore it. "Even in the hight of my touring days, I hardly ever stayed in a place this fancy."

She closed the door behind her and Maki grew anxious. In her own luggage she'd packed a few risqué articles Kotori had hand-picked for just this vacation ("You're going to be embarrassed, but you have to tell me _exactly_ what Nico is attracted to in you if we're going to pick out pieces that accentuate those features." Kotori had said softly but sternly). But she had been hoping to save those for their long nights in Okinawa.

Maki walked over to the plush bed and sat on the corner, and it sunk fabulously beneath her. She wondered, not for the first time that day, how her patients were faring back at the hospital. She could still smell the anti-septic hallways if she closed her eyes. She could still hear the beeping monitors if she strained her ears. But this was her vacation, and Maki wanted nothing more than to be living in the moment. She listened instead to the hard impacts of water pelting the glass shower stall muffled through the wooden door. Nico's singing voice carried over that, cutting right through the air; it was part of a routine Maki was used to by now, just one more Nico-induced change in her life.

Nowadays her apartment was homey. Lively, even - still neat and clean but stained in places with the colorful messes of life. At any time Maki might find a sandal on its side by the front door, or some idol magazine opened and dog-eared on the same living room table where she used to have her lonely meals, or a blanket Nico had wrapped around herself strewn on the piano bench like a shed cocoon. There weren't only stains of life, but lovely, messy sounds, too. Nico liked to sing during showers or during chores or when she cooked - she called these free shows - and the previously mute kitchen was now so often ringing with the music of clanking pans and running water, rhythmic knife chops and sizzling food. Maki loved these little songs of life, though she'd never tell Nico. They still didn't live together, not officially, although Nico spent the majority of the week at Maki's apartment. The former idol told Maki that she wanted to be there for her family and help raise little Cotaro, at least until he was just a bit older. Maki couldn't find it in herself to argue against something so pure and responsible.

The rattling of the doorknob returned Maki from her imaginative wanderings. She looked up, fingers fidgeting, to see Nico learning against the door frame with a challenging grin waiting for Maki to speak. She wore a cream-white slip that ended barely past the top of her thighs, the thin spaghetti straps all that saved it from falling to the floor in a puddle of silk. It was hemmed at the bottom with a tantalizing lace pattern. The swell of Nico's breasts pushed tight against the thin material, and the whole thing conformed, nearly traced, her every curve. Maki gulped. She couldn't control herself. Her reaction was physical, visceral - all blood and heat, a violent spreading in her flesh. She turned her cherry head and wound a lock of hair around her finger. She heard Nico chuckle, a throaty and alluring sound, but didn't look up.

"We only have this place for a night, Maki." Nico said.

"That's a new slip. Where'd you get it?"

Nico, now standing before Maki, twirled her body side to side. "You like it?"

"...It's, uh, it's nice."

"That _particular_ shade of red coloring your cheeks says that you think something else."

"N-Nico - "

Like a heart attack there was a knock at the door. Both women turned at once towards the sound. Maki looked Nico up and down; there was no way she was letting anyone else see Nico the way that she was allowed to see Nico. She shook her head.

"You can't go out like that. Wait here."

At the door Maki peered through the peephole. The concierge from earlier waited cheerfully in the hallway. Her head was distorted by the fish-hole lens like something in a funhouse mirror. After smoothing her clothes down and trying her best to hide her blush, Maki opened the door.

"Yes?"

"This is for you, courtesy of the owner!" the woman held out a deep green bottle of wine dripping with condensation, in a tall cylindrical ice bucket. In her other hand she held an envelope.

"No, wait" she shook her hand in the air back and forth as if dismissing the very thought from the air between them. "Before we accept anything, what's the catch? We've never met the owner. Why are we getting all of his free. high-class treatment?"

"I don't know - I just do my job the best I can! But the owner is a really nice woman. Maybe that's it?"

"Nice or not - "

"Just accept the gifts, Maki." Nico yelled from the other room.

The doctor's face grew red as an image of Nico flashed in her head. "....Fine. Thank you."

"Enjoy your stay!" You saluted like a naval officer, and then left for the elevator.

"Pass it here." Nico ordered when Maki re-entered the room. Maki placed the wine carefully on the floor and handed Nico the envelope. Bordered in a faux-gold filigree and without any kind of writing indicating what it was, the envelope only furthered the mystery. She pulled out a card from the inside, noting that somehow even the paper felt luxurious. It was folded over itself. A cursive English word was written on the top in gold lettering that Maki could barely read. It said, she thought, 'Salutations'.

Maki leaned over Nico's shoulder. "Open it." she said.

"I am, I am. Have some patience."

"That's rich, coming from you."

"I bet someone recognized my name and is giving me the proper treatment an idol - or a former idol - deserves."

"Just open it, Nico."

The woman did as Maki said. Written in girlish hand, gold lettered as if the words themselves were worth something, was a short message written in Japanese.

 

"Enjoy your room, your wine, and your vacation!

Try not to mess up the bed and the sheets - too - much!

With Love,

Mari Ohara"

 

"O-ohara? Nico, _this_ is one of the hotels her family owns? You didn't know that?"

"There's gotta be, like, a bunch of Ohara's out there! I just booked a room. I didn't make the connection!"

Maki held her head in her hands. "This is beyond embarrassing."

"She's got no tact, I tell you." Nico complained, pinching the bridge of her nose.

Maki flicked the card onto the bedside table. Yet again, she was reminded of work - it was as if there wasn't anywhere she could go to relax. She loved her job, but she believed that time away was important; absence made the heart grow fonder, or at least sucked away some of the pooled frustrations.

Nico, she noticed when she finally looked up, was pouring them both glasses of wine. She held two long-stemmed glasses in her hand that Maki figured must have came from the kitchenette somewhere.

"Thanks." she nodded, before taking a long sip from the glass. Through dry, the wine had a rich flavor that coated her tongue. The deep rich color was blood-like, the same blackish-red that traveled up syringes and filled up test-tubes. She tried to clear her mind of work once and for all, but instead the thought of blood changed to conjure memories of the rush of heat to her cheeks, to her palms, to her lower body, from when Nico had walked out of the bathroom. Her face flushed again. The smaller woman seemed to notice, and she approached Maki after a final gulp of the wine.

"Where were we, earlier?" she asked. Her long, lithe fingers were already trailing Maki's collarbone, the curve along her throat, the taught plain near her collarbone that lead to the hills and valley of her breasts. Nico's touch was feather light, ghostly, but the trail behind it was full of destruction - an earthquake following a volcano, all heat and trembling.

Maki bit her own lip, then pulled Nico in by the back of the neck and crashed their lips together. Nico was all but straddling her now, and Maki felt a wonderful kind of heat on her thigh She ignored her own hypocrisy over patience. Patients. She didn't want to think about either on this vacation. All she wanted was this.

But there was a buzzing. Far too close there was a buzzing, a hard rumbling that interrupted the kisses, the touches, like a mosquito might.

"Nico - Nico, your phone is going off." Maki pushed the woman back lightly. "Do something about it, please. So that - "

"Yeah, yeah. Geeze Maki, we've got all night!" she laughed. Maki studied the view when Nico bent down low to get to the bedside table. Nico adjusted the hem of her slip with a hand, and checked the phone with the other.

"I, uh, I have to take this. I'll be right back - it won't be long. Promise." Nico held up a finger, then walked into the other room. Once again, all Maki could make out were low tones, harried, hurried, and hushed. On the plush bed alone, left like a barely-begun puzzle, she grew cold where only moments before she was on fire. To _want_ to express her desire in fumbling actions and forced-out words was hard enough; to be left waiting, to feel as if she was the only one there desiring anything, filled her with embarrassment like lead in her belly. She clenched the duvet in her fists and waited.

Not much time passed before Nico returned, phone clutched at her side and then thrown, forgotten, onto the bedside table by the torn envelope.

"Sorry, sorry - but now you have my _full_ attention." she said. She approached Maki, but the doctor drew back and glared.

"I don't want it. What I want is to know what's so important and secretive about these calls you've been taking. You've had 3 of them in barely over a day. What's going on, Nico?"

"Whoa, wait - there's nothing to accuse me of, I was - "

"I don't want excuses. Tell me the truth. I trust you." Maki let that settle between them, stone heavy. "Be honest, Nico."

A year ago Maki may have simply shut the woman out and left her there. Even after she knew she loved Nico, Maki felt that trust mattered, in some instances, more than love. That she was giving Nico the benefit of the doubt at all struck Maki as some kind of strange and new side to herself - a side she didn't even know she'd developed.

The other woman closed her scarlet eyes and then visibly deflated. When she looked back at Maki again it was with an expression the doctor never though she'd see on Nico's face: embarrassment. Shame. Guilt.

"Promise not to get mad?"

"Not a chance. I _absolutely_ reserve the right to get angry. If you've - if you've ever - "

"I would never cheat on you, Maki, if that's what you're getting at. Idols are faithful. They're loyal. _I'm_ faithful and loyal."

"...Then explain what's been happening." the ice floes in Maki's blood collided and crashed, and she tried ignore the chill in her chest.

"A few weeks ago," Nico began, "An old idol friend of mine called. Said she and another idol I knew were going to be starting their own production agency - you know, a kind of 'by idols for idols' kind of thing, and they wanted to know if I wanted to be signed as the company's first idol. The face of the franchise, so to speak."

Maki crossed her arms over her chest. She never once removed her glaring eyes from Nico, who looked back directly at her. Maki couldn't decide if she found this challenging or repentant. "Go on."

"Anyway, I turned them down. But Honoka - that's the first girl - she's persistent, if nothing else." Nico rolled her eyes, then leaned against the wall across from the bed. Maki pondered the gulf between them. When did reality end and metaphor begin? "She called me back about being a third partner when I said no to joining as an idol. She called a few days later about making me a casting director. After that it was a trainer. A choreographer. A dance instructor. A scouting agent. There were, like, a thousand things she listed off. Just now she offered me a job as a secretary." Nico shook her head. "I'm not sure what's next. A janitor? _As if_."

"I don't understand. If you said no, sternly and unequivocally, then why - "

Once more Nico looked away in that very un-Nico show of guilt. She wrung her hands. "Unequivocally is a strong word. I probably could've been...firmer, I guess."

Maki's blood boiled. She stood up from the bed, clenching her firsts at her sides. She swallowed hard. "So you lied about all that stuff earlier this afternoon when you mentioned how happy you were with your new job. Is that it?"

Nico took a step closer. Maki took one back. "No - no, don't get me wrong. I meant every word I said, but - "

"But."

"How do I explain it?" she put a hand under a chin and looked at the floor thoughtfully. Maki pouted more, as if to make up for how cute her traitorous heart still managed to find Nico in the moment. The warm yellow light coming from the lamp on the bedside table was beginning to hurt the doctor's eyes. She could feel a headache coming on. "It's like this," Nico started again. "Your dad's retired, right?"

"Yeah? You know that."

"Well, I'm sure he's very happy to relax and be with your mom everyday. But don't you think he's glad whenever you call him for a consultation? Or when a conference asks him to speak? Or when a university requests him as a professor to teach for a semester? Or, hey- what about Umi? If she was asked to help train someone for the next Olympics, don't you think she'd at least consider it?"

"...What are you getting at?" Maki narrowed her eyes.

"It's just really nice, you know, to feel like all that time you spent in your life to master something _matters_." Nico's eyes shifted from Maki to the floor, and then back to the doctor's. "I spent 10 years as an idol, Maki. Very nearly a third of my life and that's not even counting all the time I spent gushing over idols, or following them, or daydreaming about being one. I really _am_ happy working in the hospital. I _really_ am happy working with _you_. But being asked for my knowledge and advice and expertize is hard to totally turn down, you know? To get to feel like an idol for just one more day."

Maki pinched the bridge of her nose. She frowned, but much of her anger had disappeared. Its remnants settled in her stomach like flakes of rust. Tiredly, she asked "So what was your plan? how long were you going to keep it up?"

"I could say 'not much longer', but I'm not going to lie to you, Maki. I didn't have a plan. I was just going to...I don't know! I was just going to give her a real 'no' at some point, before it went on forever."

"I shouldn't be surprised that forward thinking isn't your strong suit."

"Don't insult my intelligence."

"Don't pout like a child, then. Or get yourself into situations like this." Maki stood up and ran a hand through her hair. She crossed the room in slow steps and then wrapped her arms around Nico, pulling her in tightly. "I...understand how it must've made you feel. But you have to consider me in these things too, now. We're together in this. In everything."

Nico chuckled into her shoulder. "Now you sound like a spoiled princess."

"I'm selfish when it comes to the people I love." Maki released a breath and then let the other woman go. It'd been a long day - all of the walking, all of the emotional turmoil, all of the surprises filled her with a fatigue that seemed to finally reach a breaking point. Maki felt it all storing up, all stacking in her bones and muscles, a mental weight with physical weariness. Life with Nico, even a year into the relationship, tired her out even though she did, ultimately, appreciate it. She returned to bed and sat on one side with her legs hanging off. Nico followed and sat beside her.

"If I'm going to include you in my business, then I have to ask: what do I do now? How do we fix this situation?"

"It's not hard. Just tell this Honoka that you're done with the games, and that you're turning her down. Be direct."

"As if _you_ have any right to talk about being direct with feelings." Nico scoffed.

"Fine. How about this. Tell them to meet us in Okinawa. _Tomorrow_. If she's serious about you joining, she'll show. If she doesn't, stop taking her calls."

"That doesn't help us if she _does_ show up. Which, knowing Honoka, is gonna happen."

"We'll give her a stern talking to about boundaries, then." Maki crossed her arms.

Nico chuckled almost sarcastically, and then sent the woman a text. In no time at all she received a confirmation. Honoka, and her business partner Hanayo, would be happy to meet them in Okinawa the next day.

With the problem now put off like jury duty, Maki laid her head back onto the plush pillow on the bed. She still wore the clothing she'd walked around in all day. With a sigh she gathered all of her remaining energy to take a quick shower, and following that she changed into a pair of athletic shorts and a t-shirt - the least lingerie-like thing she'd brought on the trip. Nico, sitting cross-legged on the covers, grimaced.

"But what about - "

"We have a big day ahead of us." the doctor said. And then lower, "and a whole week afterwards to make up for tonight."

* * *

 

Between the taxi ride from the hotel, the snaking lines in the airport, and the long trip on the plane itself, the day after the trip to the Kurosawa's was long past half-gone by the time Maki and Nico arrived in Okinawa. There the sun shown in true July hues, there the blue sky rivaled the blue waves, there the heat Maki had complained about only a day before was both welcome and welcomely whisked away by a fresh sea breeze. The area's native architecture (long, squat buildings, slate stone structures, and earth-toned terracotta shingles) stood out obstinately against nation-less resorts of glass and steel, the kind of places Maki and Nico would be staying for the week. After they found their luggage and left the airport, Maki stopped beside an unlit street lamp. Cars came and went on the road beside them. Faceless tourists passed by in waves.

Maki adjusted the wide brim of her her straw hat with one hand to shield her eyes from the sun and wiped away wrinkles from the long, flowing undress she wore in a cooling summer blue. "We're meeting them at some sort of beach bar, you said?" she asked Nico.

"Yeah, it's not super far from here. I think we might've visited it once during some kind of colab concert. Just follow me." she lead the way.

She walked a bit behind Nico. She hadn't meant to, but sight-seeing slowed her down. The city where they'd landed wasn't unlike other port towns and tourist spots that Maki had been to in her life. There was a kind of silent struggle between the place's native way of life, the demonstration of what had drawn people in in the first place, and the commercial and corporate companies who moved in to take advantage of the tourists. It wasn't as bad as Venice. Not even close; Maki had been sorely disappointed by how pandering _that_ place had been. But clearly things were in flux. Tiny beach shacks selling local goods were placed across the street from convenience stores she'd seen in her native Tokyo. Old fashioned out-door food stands, situated between swaying palm trees, had to compete with fast food restaurants that popped up only feet away. Maki thought she might be exaggerating the issue, but that quiet, dying town from the day before was fresh in her mind. She thought about change, about adaptation, about spirit and about losing it. She gazed again at Nico, at straight-backed, sure-footed Nico, and how she turned bad knees and a forced retirement into a brand new career. A new life. Her ears were filled with the sound of crashing waves; she closed her eyes to listen closer, and intertwined Nico's fingers with her own. Nico squeezed once. Maki squeezed back.

Though the silent walk was comfortable, Maki felt relieved when it ended. They stood near one of the entrances to the beach proper. People walked past them in swimsuits, or cruised by on bikes. Not far ahead Maki noticed a bustling business with a line forming down into the sand before it. The place could hardly be called a building; it was, at best, a shed. The shack looked to be made entirely of driftwood in an open floor plan so open that there weren't any walls. Thin columns supported a slightly sloped corrugated metal roof. There were about a dozen tables in the place, each with forest green plastic chairs like one might find in a backyard, and all of them were full of customers. One long side of the shack had a set-up of burners, griddles, and metal tables, and this line ended in a tiny booth where a young woman with a bright smile worked the cash register. Mouth-watering food scents drifted on the sea breeze, mingled with a sizzling symphony.

"This is where we're meeting?" Maki asked. "I thought you idol types stayed away from decrepit shacks. It's not very sweet or cute."

"We're people too, you know. We've all got different tastes." Nico said. "Plus, it's the real unassuming places like this that make the best food. You can't even _imagine_ the way those cooks back there can throw together something delicious."

"Just looking at this stuff is giving me a heart attack."

"As if the woman who pretty much didn't cook a single home meal in forever can talk about the health of what she's eating."

Nico scoffed. "Anyway, they're already over there." Nico pointed to a table at the far end of the shack. Two women were seated there, and one of them incessantly waved with a child-like joy. If that didn't catch her attention, Maki was sure the woman's tangerine hair would.

"Is that her natural color?" Maki spoke under her breath.

"If you think her hair's bright, wait til you get a taste of her personality."

Nico took a step forward, but Maki stopped her with a tug on their still clasped hands. A few customers who had been gazing at the two former idols in the back now looked back and forth between them. "I know it's late to be saying this, but if you want to join this production company - if you really, actually want to do it - then do it. We can compromise. Figure something out to stay together, or - "

" _Compromise_ isn't part of your vocabulary," Nico laughed lightly, genuinely. She pushed the large sunglasses she was wearing to the top of her head, then added, "You're stuck with me, Nishikino - and I wouldn't change that for the world."

Maki's cheeks heated up; she felt her heart heart swell, and scowled if only for her own personal protection. As they reached the table, making their way as unobtrusively among the other diners and they could, Maki remembered what Nico had told her about the women they were meeting the night before. Honoka Kousaka was a former idol from Tokyo, who was known in the community, to fans and producers alike, for her infectious, invincible smile and the kind of can-do attitude most people lacked. She, according to Nico, cared only about idols as people who could set examples - and be set up as goals - for fans. As the epitome of the idea that if people tried, they could succeeded. She didn't last nearly as long as Nico's legendary decade, but left a lasting impression on others all the same. It was passed around idol circles that the amount of new applicants and amateur idols skyrocketed around, and for some time after, the period when Honoka was active.

Perhaps Honoka's total opposite was the other woman in this business, a slightly younger, rather normal girl who went by Hanayo Koizumi. Impossibly shy and recognized for her crippling sense of stage-fright, Hanayo might've been the last person Maki expected to be an idol. The woman, however, had a reputation for putting on shows that caused audience after audience to leave in happy, cathartic tears, so pure was her own love of idols, idol culture, and the very fans who came to see her show. Nico mentioned, with no uncertain amount of respect, that it wasn't rare for Hanayo to invite fans and concert-goers up to the stage - fans that she handpicked during shows, who she could intuitively sensed were just as shy or self-conscious as she was. She wanted to to show these girls that even they deserved to shine. Hanayo's knowledge of all things idol-related was unmatched - so much so that she ran the most popular and extensive idol news and history website in all of Japan.

This is what Maki kept in mind as she and Nico made their way to the women, and this was what she was comparing them to. She felt out of place going to the table, like a pacifist entering a war room and being asked to help plan an attack strategy. Between her unceasing wave Honoka took bites of an impossibly large _yakisoba-pan_ sandwich. Beside her, Hanayo diligently ate what looked to be a simple, unordered bowl of white rice. Hanayo looked up with a shy smile as she wiped a piece of white rice stuck off her cheek.

Maki sat down across from Hanayo at the four-person table, and Nico took the seat beside her, opposite Honoka. Maki couldn't hear the waves even though they were barely a hundred feet from the water. Just the chatter of patrons and the sizing of food and the singular chiming of the cash register. She barely had this moment of reflection before Honoka - still smiling - all but yelled "Hello!" She reached across the table and gripped Maki's hand between two of her warm ones. It took most of Maki's inner strength not to pull away, not to shirk from the embrace and grimace. "You must be Maki! It's nice to meet you!"

The doctor looked over to Nico, who shrugged. "It's not like I hid the fact that I've been dating you."

"Well then, it's...good to meet you too, Miss. Kousaka." She turned to Hanayo. "And you likewise, Ms. Koizumi."

As if she'd heard the funniest joke in the world, Honoka threw back her head for a loud guffaw. "Ms. Kousaka? please, Maki! Call me Honoka! I'm sure Hanayo feels the same!" Hanayo nodded, bright-eyed, in Maki's direction. Maki nodded. She felt out of place there between the three idols. Each had an intensity, even quiet Hanayo, that spoke to their true calling as stars of the stage. Whereas her own personality was formed on knowledge, on proving herself, on a kind of world-weary cynicism, the three women surrounding her were different. She sensed that underneath their individual personalities had to be an identical innocent glee, a soft glowing heart that made them become the idols that they once were. She sat back in her seat and looked towards Nico. Honoka and Hanayo followed.

"Look, girls," Nico leaned forward and slammed her palms against the table only loud enough for it to add emphasis. "Let's cut to the chase. I really appreciate the offers. Honestly, I do."

"So you'll accept?" Honoka broke in.

"Oi, Kousaka, let me finish. I _appreciate_ all of the offers you've given me, but I have to decline. Totally and completely."

"All of them?" Hanayo asked. "There are even a few positions we could give you that wouldn't require you to be at our office every day. I-if that's the problem, of course."

Honoka nodded excitedly. She seemed to do everything excitedly. "Yeah! We just want to get someone as knowledgeable and passionate about idols as you, Nico! You're our friend. We haven't even considered anyone else for a partnership role yet."

"We would love to have your advice and experience, Nico. You were an idol for a decade - there's no one else out there who knows as much as you. C-can you imagine how we could help girls out there reach their dreams, together?" Hanayo added.

In her near-isolated seat - an island off a 3-shore coast - Maki waited for Nico to respond. She looked intently at the checkered tablecloth on the table, and at no one else. She waited for an answer to the question that affected both of them from there on out. Nico turned to her and shook her shoulder; out of the corner of Maki's eye she noticed once more Nico's pink nail polish. Nico grinned. She grinned and then leveled one of those unrivaled, determined expressions Maki had seen so many times before, and her heart skipped a beat. A shroud, nervously worn, lifted from her heart. Maki resisted the urge to break out into a bright smile, and then let it go anyway, like a reticent father on the day of his daughter's wedding.

"Right now, I work in a hospital with Maki - I don't think I told you guys that. I get to help others the way _I_ was helped. I get to bring smiles to people's faces everyday, _and_ I get to do it side by side with this smart, beautiful, motivated woman. I'm happy." Nico said with the ghost of a melancholic smile gracing her lips, "And I never thought I'd be happy at a time in my life when I couldn't be an idol. That's my answer, girls." She waited a beat and then added with a sarcastic smirk, "Unless this position comes with some hotter, smarter doctor or something."

A silent, unmoving beat passed before Nico's words sunk in, a supersonic jet of a declaration with its own emotional sonic boom. Maki's cheeks heated up a million degrees, her heart glowing in her chest so lightly, so sweetly, that she felt the immediate need to cross her arms and cover her chest and protect it. She bit her lip and looked anywhere that wasn't Nico. That became much harder when the woman wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Hanayo dotted her eyes with a napkin. Honoka's grin lost its excessive energy and instead picked up a true warmth.

"I see." she said, nodding. "I get it, Nico. I'm really, really happy for you! That's why Hanayo and I decided to do this in the first place - to give back, you know? To teach other girls how to spread those smiles and start them on their own path."

Hanayo nodded. "Exactly. I remember what had made me love idols, a-and how it gave me hope. I want to give hope to others too."

"So then, you get it - why I'm going to stick with the good doctor here, right?"

Honoka pushed back from her seat and stood up. She motioned for Hanayo to do the same. "Definitely, Nico. But we're gonna keep in touch, alright? We're still friends, you know!"

Hanayo beamed. "Who else is going to geek out over idols with me?"

"Yeah, yeah." Nico rolled her eyes, smirking. "And who knows, maybe I'll point a couple of my patients your way if I think they have promise."

"Nico! There's doctor-patient confidentiality to think about. And conflicts of interest. And - "

"And there are no secrets between idols or friends, Maki."

"Nico!"

"Oi, calm down Nishikino. I won't break any rules. Though, considering when we got together, I'm not sure you have the right to talk about that."

"That's it - now I _want_ you to join those two. Go ahead. Leave."

Hanayo and Honoka laughed. Nico beamed in contest with the sun.

* * *

 

Their resort room had a balcony; it was something Maki insisted on when she planned this leg of the trip. She was standing on it, though night had fallen, and was looking over the smooth white railing into the ever-moving waves below the resort colliding into rocky shores and cliffs. The breeze ruffled her hair softly, a kind hand. Despite how late it was, the sky refused to wear her black cloak and donned instead something indigo, a deep dark blue, a tease of the morning with a silvery moon at its center. Try as she might - try as she _did_ \- she couldn't wipe the smile from her face. Nico's words hadn't left her mind in hours. She turned from the waves to the moon, to see the hazy ring of light around it, and thought it a spotlight.

Her star walked onto the balcony carrying two glasses of white wine, then. In the night the wine's pale golden color took on an ethereal shimmering. She placed the them on a round table beside the door before approaching Maki.

"Sorry, took me a sec to get that cork out."

Maki shrugged. "We're on vacation. There's no need to rush anything."

"Are _you_ advocating for patience? That might actually be first. Even at home, you're not usually this relaxed. And forget about what you're like at work."

"I don't need your commentary." she pouted. "the past two days have just - gotten to me, I suppose."

"That was the intended effect of the Kurosawa thing. Well, in a way."

"And what was the intended effect of the idol thing? Torturing me? Worrying me?"

"How many times do I have to apologize? It's all sorted out now anyway." Nico, who'd been leaning with her back to the railings, turned around and matched Maki's posture. "And don't lie; I'm positive you got something out of how cool I sounded back there."

"Don't flatter yourself, Yazawa."

"Don't blush so red, Nishikino."

The doctor shook her head and leaned over, bending slightly towards her girlfriend. Nico took the hint, heard the words Maki was still too embarrassed to say, and kissed her sweetly. Maki's heart swelled. They separated and Maki looked back at the moon. She felt Nico's gaze on her, warm and possessive and loving. Maki was beyond pleased that their kisses and embraces had yet to lose the neediness and power they'd started with. She hoped they never would.

Maki considered _never_. She considered _forever_ , too. And, for perhaps the first time on this vacation, thoughts of the hospital faded away completely. Her past, Nico's past, their future - none of it mattered more than the present moment, more than the little world of warmth and adoration that existed there in their midst. Searchingly, in the blue-black of the night, in the swell of the waves crashing in her heart, she reached out for Nico. The other woman met her half way.

Maki squeezed their tightly held hands, hoping that that could say everything she couldn't. Nico squeezed back just as tightly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Reviews, criticisms, and responses are all welcome!


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